is Associate Professor at Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St.-Petersburg State University and Editor in Chief of Emergency Rations: Debates on Politics and Culture. His research focuses on early Soviet Russian intellectual and cultural history, practices of self-fashioning of the Soviet Subject, and the historical and cultural politics of contemporary Russia, including post-Soviet social and cultural transformations, contemporary Russian politics of history, and the dialectics of modernization and demodernization and contemporary Russian identity politics.
On the Cape of Tarkhankut on the western shores of Crimea lies an underwater ‘graveyard’ of statues from the Soviet past. The museum is a metaphor for how cultural memories are formed in a shared unconscious traumatized by loss and unable to adjust to the new order of things, writes Ilya Kalinin.