But just because I have apparently forgotten slabs of my own history does not mean I am immune to them. One particularly resonant thing I have learned in my research is that we do not just refashion memory; it also refashions us. Like osmosis, memory seeps through into the way we act and feel, without us making conscious connections between the present and the past. It is there in how we raise our kids, where we choose to live, who we drink with, whose hands we refuse to shake. You will understand, therefore, that in the Soviet Union all forms of remembering, direct or indirect, will get you into trouble. For seven decades there the past existed in the public arena as pure ideology, invariably at odds with reality, and uncontaminated by lived memory. When the public past has nothing to do with what people remember and when remembering your own past even in private is inherently dangerous, people do not simply forget or repress, they find other ways of not letting the past go.
Historian Jehanne Gheith tells a story about Mikhail Afanasievich, a Gulag survivor who kept silent about his time in the camps even when he thought he was going to die. Yet one thing he did after being released was to get himself an enormous German shepherd and name him Stalin, which, on some level, was a breathtakingly reckless thing to do. This was the first thing Mikhail Afanasievich told Gheith when they met, waiting for her reaction. ‘I outwaited him,’ Gheith writes, ‘and he said: “Why did I name the dog Stalin? So that we won’t forget…”’ A woman called Nina, who was a teenager during the war, recounted coming home from school one day to find a seal on her apartment door. Her mother, Zoya Mikhailovna, had been arrested on charges of espionage, and they would never see each other again. Nina too was soon arrested herself and accused of being a German spy. When she was released, Nina felt she couldn’t tell anyone about what happened; instead, she decided to have a daughter and name her Zoya Mikhailovna in honour of her mother. To do that, she had to marry a man called Mikhail so that her daughter would have the same patronymic as her mother – and she had to give birth to a girl. She succeeded on both counts.
But even in societies where you do not have to struggle with the mismatch between what you remember and what you are meant to remember, memories do not come out of us as perfectly formed stories about the past. They are not always conscious or intentional or contained. Cognitive scientists who study memory distinguish between declarative and non-declarative memory systems; the latter, they say, is ‘hard-coded’ into us and cannot be accessed consciously. The most obvious of these is ‘the body knows’ type of memory. Your fingers can dial a phone number that you cannot consciously recall, while your legs can take you to the place that your brain cannot locate in space. (In fact, in many of these situations, the conscious attempt to recall something could be an inhibitor.) Scientists and philosophers alike call this the memory of ‘knowing how’ as opposed to ‘knowing that’. Another type of non-declarative memory is the traumatic memory, the kind that is involuntary in its nature, catching us unawares and pushing us off our feet. Flashback is perhaps the most familiar form of this, but there are all kinds of other types of the unconscious remembering that manifest themselves through our bodies, our emotional responses and our interactions with the world and other people.
As a historian I have come to see that a great deal of our memories occupy a grey zone between declarative and non-declarative, between parts of our life we can turn into a coherent narrative and other parts that work behind the scenes making us in some profound sense who we are. The same is true of the way memories are passed on within families. Linguist Ruth Wajnryb, who has interviewed many Australian children of the Holocaust survivors (she is one of them), writes that the majority of people she had spoken to did not remember being told about their parents’ history. Being born into their particular family meant they were born knowing. Wajnryb calls this kind of memory ‘an oblique knowledge, more a sensing at a visceral or subconscious rather than a cognitive level’. This is what many of Australia’s indigenous kids taken away from their parents – the nation’s stolen generations – grew up with. Their true identity may have been silenced, distorted or denied, but this kind of oblique knowledge, this subconscious sensing of their roots that Wajnryb talks about, proved much harder to eradicate.
Like countless people of her generation, my paternal grandmother kept secrets all her life. My dad was in his late forties when he learned that she had had another husband before she married his father, and that this first husband had perished in the camps as an Enemy of the People. I believe she only told her son because we were leaving for Australia, and she did not expect to see him again. But this is not why she is on my mind now. I remember very well how she would always pick up crumbs of bread from her table one by one and put them into her mouth, and would follow me as I carried a sandwich from the kitchen to the couch, bending to pick up the trail of crumbs I dropped. At the time I had no idea about the Holodomor (literally ‘death by starvation’) – the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s in which millions of people died. I learnt about it only after I came to Australia, as more and more information emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and as the newly independent Ukrainian government lobbied for the famine to be internationally recognised as an act of genocide. The famine was artificially induced, a direct result of Stalin’s government policies, not of failed seasons. Now I knew what my grandmother had gone through, and what her obsession with breadcrumbs actually meant. Her experiences were passed on to me not as a story but as an encrypted image I could only decode years later. But I never forgot it, sensing as a child that it had some kind of unspoken meaning and history. ‘Children can smell narrative,’ writes Ruth Wajnryb, ‘the way airport police dogs can smell drugs. And they are drawn to it in the same way.’
In my field when historians talk about social memory, they often talk about museums and anniversaries, about media controversies and sites of memory (I have written about them myself at length), about oppressive silences and collective amnesia. But when I think about social memory, about the very essence of it, I remember a passage from historian Irina Sherbakova’s essay about memory in the Soviet Union. What happened in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, she says, was an unspoken, or barely spoken, part of every conversation. These were the memories that people ‘would take out of the air, from the drunken narrative, from the eternal question – and which year are you from? (This question meant almost the most important thing – were you part of it or not, did you fight in the war or not?)’ I think this is precisely it, this image of the ‘air’ in the room. Perhaps it was that air that changed irrevocably with the collapse of the Soviet Union, prompting the spread of the ‘dull melancholia’ described so evocatively by Chudakova. This vision of memory as an unspoken, or barely spoken, part of every conversation reminds us of how often memory is both preserved and transmitted in deeply intangible ways. This is what philosopher Edward S. Casey called ‘an active immanence of the past’ in our bodies, our ways of being and, of course, in the spaces we inhabit and share with others.