The trauma of destruction and restoration of the religious image in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

The article examines the fate of the Russian icon in the Soviet and post-Soviet sociocultural continuum as an indicative trajectory of cultural trauma, in which the destruction, preservation, and restoration of the image function not as isolated episodes in art history but as practices of producing memory and organized forgetting. The icon is interpreted as a special type of sacred object whose significance is not exhausted by visual form, since its “social life” was determined by its embeddedness in ritual, everyday life, and collective identity; for this reason, the violent desacralization of the twentieth century is described as an epistemological rupture that altered regimes of perception of the image and the permissibility of interacting with it. It is shown that Soviet iconoclasm operated as symbolic violence, producing lacunae of memory and transforming the icon either into material subject to utilitarian use or into a museum exhibit whose value was defined by criteria external to religious experience. Post-Soviet processes of returning icons to the church space are revealed as a conflict of mnemonic communities and regimes of truth: the restorative ethic of preserving traces of time collides with the liturgical demand for integrity and “decorum,” while commercial stylization and mass reproduction of images form a hyperreality of the sacred in which authenticity is displaced by the consumption of signs. On the basis of a comparison of strategies for dealing with the traumatized image—from destruction to conservation, renewal, and replica—it is shown that any intervention functions as an act of interpretation of history, fixing a particular version of the past and thereby politicizing restoration. Special attention is given to the semiotics of damage: scars that arose as a result of anti-ritual in the present may acquire the status of testimony and a “martyrial aura,” whereas their removal turns into a soft form of erasing traumatic memory. Ultimately, the article makes it possible to assess the relevance of studying the icon as a nodal “site of memory,” where contemporary society conducts a debate about acceptable forms of continuity, about the boundaries of the sacred and the cultural, and about how the restoration of material form correlates with the possibility of acknowledging and living through historical trauma.