Performing the deportation of Kalmyks: From Memory Trains to media projects

Abstract

The article raises questions of historical policy in the fields of culture and especially media-projects in the Republic of Kalmykia. As a topic that until recently (until 1990) was impossible to discuss in public, but is very important to Kalmyk identity, Stalin’s total deportation of the Kalmyks to Siberia in 1943-1957 - is reflected in theatrical actions organized by the state (such as rallies of Memory, Memory Trains), as well as visual Internet projects (documentary films They could and we can, 2017, author of the project - television host Sangadji Tarbaev; Kalmyks: Return, 2018, Sisters by Mingiyan Mandjiev). The author traces the dynamics of the interpretation during the last 30 years: from dramatized assessments to softer ones that inscribe the history of the deportation of the Kalmyks within the history of the Great Patriotic War. The author argues that theater and Internet projects are an important field of cultural production, in which the state sees not only an entertainment component, but also a laboratory that grows new meanings of the social. Theatricalization of the traumatic past becomes an instrument of reconciliation with the past: this leads to a change in the historical discourse in the community, which perceives such spectacles as allowing them to become eyewitnesses to a distant event. As for documentaries with oral testimonies about the deportation, they are perceived as a dialogue with relatives with whom the viewers did not get to speak.