The Memory Studies Group at the New School will host two scholars from the 'Conspiratorial Memory: Cultures of Suspicion in Post-Socialist Europe' research project (2021-2026) presenting their work in progress:
Daria Khlevnyuk - Coopting conspiracy: Conspiratorial memory of the USSR’s demise in pro-Soviet and nationalist online communities in Russia
In 2021, the National Liberation Movement (NOD), a nationalist social movement backed by the Russian state, started gathering signatures to petition the Russian Supreme Court to overrule the USSR’s breakup. The petition claims that the dissolution of the USSR was unlawful and resulted from a conspiracy between Mikhail Gorbachev and other key politicians of the time. To motivate people to sign, the activists addressed current problems: the reunification of the USSR would have stopped the war in Donbas (pre-February 24, 2022) and would stop the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, prevent opening the “second front” in Georgia, strengthen the country against the hostile West.
The idea that the dissolution of the USSR was a conspiracy is not new; in fact, it has been circulating in other milieus, especially pro-Soviet communities. Some of them also petitioned the courts or even went as far as claiming that the USSR still existed, Russian passports are void, and that the current regime has usurped power. The latter communities are now outlawed. However, the topic is new for the National Liberation Movement, which previously did not engage deeply with the Soviet memory.
This paper presents a social media study of pro-Soviet (nostalgic for the USSR and actively promoting the political aspect of this nostalgia) and state-sponsored nationalist groups such as the NOD. I study the case from two perspectives. First, as an instance of state appropriation of ‘counter-memory.’ Second, I compare these two conspiratorial memories about the USSR’s demise to show the twofold nature of the conspiratorial memory concept. In some cases, such as the pro-Soviet groups, the emphasis is primarily on memory, while in others, such as the NOD’s social media groups, it is foremost on the conspiracy element and the need for action.
Boris Noordenbos - Mutated Temporalities: The Conspiratorial Memory of the Chornobyl Nuclear Disaster
Ever since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has repeatedly disseminated disinformation about Western and/or Ukrainian sabotage at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. This paper traces these allegations back to a Russian tradition of Chornobyl-themed conspiracy stories. Specifically, it analyzes a persistent journalistic and cultural narrative asserting that Chornobyl was not an accident, but a Western-planned sabotage operation.
Zooming in on Russian-language popular culture and news coverage from the last decade, the paper discusses the story’s variants, addressing the ways in which it is bound up with speculations about the “real forces” behind the Soviet Union’s collapse. Some of these theories imagine alternative histories and radiant futures that would have unfolded if not for the enemies' nefarious interventions in 1986. Other Chernobyl conspiracy stories depict the nuclear exclusion zone around the plant as a supernatural site where the Soviet Union’s dissolution could be magically reversed. Their differences apart, these narratives imagine Chornobyl as having wrought a dreadful “mutation” in the course of history.
This paper suggests that the conspiratorial memory of Chernobyl has been coopted for the Kremlin’s neo-imperialist propaganda during the Russo-Ukrainian war. Specifically, Moscow’s recent narratives about the Zaporizhzhia power plant are brimming with speculation about Chernobyl, and often pivot on the assertion that – this time – Russia’s imperial ambitions will not be undermined by the West’s nuclear sabotage.
Presented by The Memory Studies Group at The New School, the European Research Council, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, and Memory in the Disciplines at Stony Brook University.
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I am an Associate Professor of History at the New School for Social Research. I am a proponent of a critical history and view historicization as an instrument for rethinking and reimagining the world against convention and expectation; a mode of discovery, reframing, and estranging that is inherently political.
Elzbieta Matynia is Professor and Chair of Sociology, Professor of Liberal Studies, and founding director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). Her research in political and cultural sociology focuses on democratic transformations, gender and democracy, the borderlands of a shared Europe, and more recently on the challenges faced by democracies emerging with a legacy of violence.
The Memory Studies Group at the New School is based at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) under the auspices of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). It was launched more than a decade ago by a cohort of graduate students. The conferences they organized over time that brought together leading scholars in social, cultural, and public memory across the disciplines, the fellowship programs, and finally an array of outstanding dissertations, made the New School a recognized site of Memory Studies, and one that contributed to shaping and establishing it as a field of study in the United States.
We work closely with interested graduate students, faculty, and our alumni to create a dynamic working hub, both intellectually inspiring and collegially supportive, to share the initial ideas, works-in-progress, research proposals, conference papers, dissertation chapters, and book manuscripts.
Following our predecessors, now all very accomplished alumni, we are eager to work on designing annual conferences, hosting guest lectures and book launches, thus trying to illuminate the pressing issues of our own time as they involve –for example– the politics of memory, history, or identity.
We welcome new members and old friends both NSSR based and alumni of the New School, as well as associates from other institutions in the United States and abroad. Contact us at memorystudies@newschool.edu.
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The European Research Council's mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, based on scientific excellence.
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The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. A research community devoted to the comparative and interdisciplinary study of culture (in all its forms and expressions) from a broad humanities perspective. Located at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) is a research community devoted to the comparative and interdisciplinary study of culture (in all its forms and expressions) from a broad humanities perspective.
ASCA is home to more than 110 scholars and 120 PhD candidates active in film and media studies, literature, philosophy, visual culture, musicology, religious studies, theatre and performance studies.
Specialists in their own respective fields, ASCA members share a commitment to working within an interdisciplinary framework and to maintaining a close connection with contemporary cultural and political debates. Within ASCA, they collaborate to provide an innovative and stimulating research environment for scholars, professionals, and graduate students from the Netherlands and abroad.
ASCA does not subscribe to any single theoretical or methodological practice, but, rather, is defined precisely by its interdisciplinary approach, in which researchers work at the intersections of core disciplines in the humanities to develop new theoretical frameworks and research methodologies for analysing culture in all its forms and expressions. ASCA is the only humanities research institute in the Netherlands to place interdisciplinarity and theoretical research on culture at the core of its mission, vision, and programme.
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The Memory in the Disciplines at Stony Brook University project is a partnership between the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (HISB), the Initiative for Historical Social Sciences (IHSS) and the departments of English and Sociology.
In recent years, a large and growing body of scholarship on the social and cultural dynamics of memory has gained recognition as a field: memory studies. Scholars from disciplines as diverse as Art History, History, Literature, Music Theory, Journalism, Performance Studies, Media Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Neuroscience and Sociology have common interests in this topic, but their discussions have been largely confined to their individual disciplines. Memory in the Disciplines invites these scholars to participate in a sustained exchange. We expect not only to learn more about memory, but also to explore the potential and limitations of interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration.
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The 'Conspiratorial Memory: Cultures of Suspicion in Post-Socialist Europe' research project (2021-2026)
Recently, the Kremlin has defended its unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine with ludicrous historical parallels and far-fetched conspiracy theories. The Russian war against Ukraine spotlights the most aggressive purposes to which “conspiratorial memory” can be put. Yet in other Eastern European contexts, too, culturally mediated and politically harnessed stories of manipulation and deceit (whether factual or not) go hand in hand with invocations of the twentieth-century past, its enduring effects, and the (subterranean) threats it might continue to pose.
This five-year ERC-funded research project (2021-2026) studies the entanglements of cultural memory and conspiracy theorizing in Eastern European film, literature, museums, public ceremonies, and online culture. The project resists historically isolated approaches and nationally focused perspectives on conspiracy theory. It also turns away from a scholarly tradition that treats the conspiratorial worldview as an individual pathology. Instead, our team spotlights conspiratorial imagination as a politically influential cultural practice. We analyze the commemorative gestures, the transnational interactions, and the digital circulations that give conspiracy culture its specific twenty-first-century momentum.
Zooming in on four Eastern European case studies, the team members use qualitative methods of cultural analysis to examine how (conflicting) narratives about the past determine conspiracy culture’s hermeneutic practices, horizons of expectation, and affective attachments. In addition, the project studies the circulations of “conspiratorial memory” across national and cultural borders. Employing quantitative digital methods, we analyze how such cross-cultural interactions are facilitated and shaped by the specific affordances of online platforms.
While focusing on Eastern Europe, the project is interested in the wider dynamics and repercussions of “conspiratorial memory” beyond the region – its digital expressions, cultural mediations, and political instrumentalizations.
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Daria Khlevnyuk is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam, part of the ERC-funded research project Conspiratorial Memory: Cultures of Suspicion in Post-Socialist Europe. Her current research engages with the ‘old left’ memory culture in Russia, pro-Soviet memory communities, difficult pasts, and contested collective memories. She published on museum exhibitions on the Soviet repressions in Russian regions and online memories.
Boris Noordenbos is Associate Professor of Literary & Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, and affiliated to the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).
His publications focus on culture’s engagements with the past, with a special interest in the former Soviet Union. Boris is the author of Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of the volume Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies (Routledge, 2019). He is the Principal Investigator in the ERC-funded research project Conspiratorial Memory: Cultures of Suspicion in Post-Socialist Europe (2021-2026).
Elzbieta Matynia is Professor and Chair of Sociology, Professor of Liberal Studies, and founding director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). Her research in political and cultural sociology focuses on democratic transformations, gender and democracy, the borderlands of a shared Europe, and more recently on the challenges faced by democracies emerging with a legacy of violence.
As head of TCDS, she has developed and directs international Democracy & Diversity Institutes for rigorous study and cross-cultural research on the critical issues facing today’s world. Her book Performative Democracy (2009, Paradigm), explores a potential in political life that easily escapes theorists: the indigenously inspired enacting of democracy by citizens. Challenges following 1989 are explored in her An Uncanny Era. Conversations between Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel (2013 Yale University Press). A Fulbright research scholar in South Africa, she is working on a new book, Democracy After Violence. Elzbieta is a member of the editorial board of Social Research.
I am an Associate Professor of History at the New School for Social Research. I am a proponent of a critical history and view historicization as an instrument for rethinking and reimagining the world against convention and expectation; a mode of discovery, reframing, and estranging that is inherently political. Indeed, politics has been my recurrent subject matter, and “culture” (broadly conceived to include literature, knowledge, science, memory, performance, and communication) my preferred entry point for analysis, critique, and teaching.
My fields of interest include US history (especially the nineteenth century), American presence abroad, modern British history, knowledge and its transmission, radicalism and its culture, social history, comparative history, history of the state, memory and commemoration, and history of the book. My recently published book “States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain and the United States” explores the early roots of the modern informational states. I am now engaged in a transnational study that follows the social, cultural and political relationship between the US and Israel at the turn of the 1970s.
