Nostalgia in Moscow
This article explores the current formations of nostalgia as they have emerged in contemporary Moscow. It examines this theme through the prism of three architectural spaces that tell us something about nostalgia as a postsocialist and specific cultural and temporal condition : Moscow’s Park of Sculpture, the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and the shopping mall in Manezh Square. I argue that what is politically at work at these sites is a certain kind of de-ideologization that has become “the new style” in postSoviet Russia. De-ideologization has turned into a historical norm, an affective fashion, and I argue that it is precisely because of this process that a “nostalgia industry” has emerged. This article takes the attachments of nostalgia seriously, but rather than looking at nostalgia as an analytical symptom, I am interested in examining it as a historical condition, a temporal response that emerges in a particular moment in time.