Review of Galvanizing Nostalgia? Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Siberia

• Published in: Slavic Review
• Main Author: Ulturgasheva, Olga
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Sakha; Siberia
• Online Access: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/508a01da-669d-4919-841c-f1efb42f0472; https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/files/273155478/galvanizing_nostalgia_indigeneity_and_sovereignty_in_siberia_by_marjorie_mandelstam_balzer_ithaca_cornell_university_press_2021_xvi_254_pp_notes_bibliography_index_illustrations_photographs_maps_dolla.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2023.145

Recent decades have seen a proliferation of social science studies focusing on nostal- gia in post-socialist countries. The number of nostalgia-driven takes on post-socialism has grown substantially, turning nostalgia into a dominant paradigm for understand- ing experiences of the social upheavals following the collapse of socialism. A range of scholarly discourses on post-socialist nostalgia with all its shades, twists, and turns is exhilaratingly wide ranging, from the politics of memory and past-oriented nostalgia to social action, cultural production, and affective futurities. In my view the most recent book by Marjorie Mandelstam-Balzer, presenting profiles of the three Siberian Republics of Buriatiia, Tuva, and Sakha, stands out for its environmental and ethnonational focus that helps unpack the ways nostalgia produces a galvaniz- ing effect for environmental activism: activism that has been formed in response to the decades of communal spiritual revitalization efforts, “encroachment of political, cultural and human rights alongside erosion of territorial guarantees, and unprec- edented industrialization without adequate ecological oversight” (165).