Soviet memorabilia

I recently bought these Soviet items that I have a lot of appreciation for.

My relation to Soviet memorabilia is very ambiguous. I don’t believe that the Soviet Union was ever socialist in the strict sense of the word, and I don’t think it was even a dictatorship of the proletariat for most of its existence. And the most widely available Soviet memorabilia is from the 50s-80s anyway, during which the revolutionary potential of the USSR was at its lowest, as it grew increasingly more comfortably integrated into the capitalist world market.

Yet, despite all this, I love Soviet memorabilia. First of all, I just love some of it aesthetically, independently of political affiliation, and I did so since I was a child, before I ever became interested in politics. There’s definitely a level of nostalgia there, given that I myself was born in an ex-Soviet country.

Secondly, there’s the modernist form some of it has, at least the architecture, which is utopian in a lot of its origins and aspirations.

But, of course, I love the political content depicted in a lot of it as well. I love the working-class representation, and I love the depictions of the 1917 revolution, which, despite its eventual degeneration, I still believe to be one of the greatest events in human history. It is strange to appreciate art depicting revolution from a regime that had at the point this art was produced become increasingly repressive. Is this art still revolutionary? Is art depicting a Soviet worker really working-class representation or just a distortion of it? Can the superstructure of a repressive society nevertheless produce something revolutionary? I feel ambiguity towards depictions of Lenin as well, as I admire him greatly, while also knowing that he would’ve hated what was done with his image in the later USSR.

It’s strange to be so critical of a past regime and yet so affectionate towards some of its state-sponsored products. Despite all its problems, the Soviet Union academies did great things preserving labor history that otherwise would have been lost. It rescued and preserved the works of Marx that otherwise might have been lost. It documented, for the first time to such an extent, the labor history of my own country, Lithuania, even if this documentation was selective and ideologically restrictive. East Germany did incredible work researching and preserving the history of the German Revolution, which otherwise even the social-democrats did not care to preserve very much. They created artworks depicting Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht that still stand today, making sure that they are not forgotten. It’s hard for me not to feel some amount of gratitude for these efforts.

I guess, in the end, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and in appropriating things from what it left us we are like scavengers among ruins. What really matters is how we treat them today and to what ends we use them, rather than what their origins are. Or maybe I’m overthinking all of this and, like everything under late capitalism, Soviet art is reduced to just another sub-cultural identifier and commodity.