Post-1989 East European politics became a hermeneutic battle over the ‘essence’ of the socialist era with tremendous repercussions for the present.  A generation after the fall of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe is reeling from renewed confrontations with its socialist past. The latest protest wave in particular has re-ignited frantic interpretative polemics, but the fights are different now, and those engaging in them are often from a new generation.  Certainly, the spontaneous, live-streamed toppling of a Lenin statue in 2014 isn’t the same gesture as the removal of Lenins or other socialist monuments twenty-odd years ago.  

This panel revisits questions of form and function in post-socialist East Europe.  Attending to recent social upheaval in Ukraine and Bulgaria, creeping nationalism in Russia and Hungary, and increasing frustration with inequality and insecurity in the European Union, we investigate what has happened to old forms whose previous functions were lost or are now considered distasteful, as well as old forms that have been revitalized or resignified.   Questions we are invested in include:

To what extent can signs and symbols of the past be reappropriated or recontextualized?  What semiotic processes facilitate or encumber resignification?  

When has form been subordinated to function; when has function been subordinated to form?  How have such actions reframed (or not reframed?) the socialist experience?

Has there been a resurgence of ‘left’ and ‘right’ politics in East Europe?  How are the symbols of such movements similar to or different from their predecessors?

Who are the guardians of socialist memory today?