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While Europeans talk about the “mnemonic age” and the obsession with the past around the globe, Russians complain about the historical “amnesia” in their country. My current project reveals that Russian authors and filmmakers have been obsessed by the work of mourning. They do so in novels, films, and other forms of culture that reflect, shape, and possess people’s memories. I believe that the asymmetry of Memory Studies across Europe should be understood as a political challenge rather than a natural divide. Russia’s leaders are shifting the country’s ‘chosen trauma’ away from the crimes of Stalinism to the collapse of the USSR, which Vladimir Putin called ‘the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century’. This shift at once casts the millions of victims of Soviet terror as unworthy of mourning (or ‘ungrievable,’ in Judith Butler’s parlance) and invites Russians to mourn the state that murdered them. The uncanny scenery of post-Soviet literature and film signals the failure of other, more conventional ways of understanding social reality. This failure and this scenery are nothing new, though post-Soviet conditions exacerbated the wild character of these phantasms. No Iron Curtain has separated Russians from their past. The trauma of the Great Terror of the 1930s, which was essentially a collective suicide of the political and cultural elite of the country, produced cyclical after-shocks that marked the subsequent decades of Russian history. From the return of the Gulag prisoners in the 1950s to the first dissidents of the 1960s, to the grand Soviet film-making of the 1970s, to the archival revelations of the 1980s, to what I call the “magical historicism” of post-Soviet culture, the ghosts of Stalinism and its victims have been stubbornly haunting Russian culture. Inhabiting culture as their ecological niche, the undead constitute a particular kind of collective memory, which becomes prominent when more reliable forms of this memory, such as museums, monuments, or historical textbooks, betray the dead. Etkind is MAW Project Leader and Principal Investigator and Reader in Russian Literature and Cultural History in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. His current research interests include internal colonization in the Russian Empire, narratology from Pushkin to Nabokov and comparative studies of cultural memory. He is author of "Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror"; "Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory" (16/1 (2009): 182-200); Bare Monuments to Bare Life: The Soon-to-Be-Dead in Arts and Memory in "Gulag Studies" (Volume1, 2008: 27-33); "Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?" in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History" (6, 1 winter 2005: 171-186); Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (translated by Noah and Maria Rubens), published in Russian and translated into French, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Serbian and Bulgarian. Dr. Etkind's current group project is Memory at War, an international collaborative project investigating the cultural dynamics of the "memory wars" currently raging in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Employing a collaborative methodology grounded in the analytical and critical practices of the humanities, the project seeks to explore how public memory of 20th century traumas mediates the variety of ways in which East European nations develop in post-socialist space. The University of Cambridge is leading this project, which will be accomplished in association with the Universities of Bergen, Helsinki, Tartu and Groningen. The project was launched in 2010 and will run for three years.