Introduction

Summary

A young girl bites her lip as she maintains a stubborn silence in the face of her Nazi tormentors. A flight attendant falls from the sky, shot by a father-andson hijacking team. A Chilean folk singer lies dead, his hands shattered by right-wing thugs. A once-reviled oligarch acquires the halo of a saint as he rots in a prison camp. Though these four figures are from diff erent times, places, and even hemispheres, all of them entered a pantheon of Soviet and post-Soviet “heroes” whose status stems primarily from their victimhood. And all of them are featured in this book, which examines the language of canonization and vilification in Soviet and post-Soviet media, official literature, and popular culture. I argue that early Soviet narratives constructed the stories of national heroes and villains alike as examples of uncovering a person's “true self.” The official culture used such stories to encourage heroic self-fashioning among Soviet youth and as a means of self-policing and censure. Later Soviet narratives maintained sacrificial imagery as a means of asserting ideology's continued hold on society, while the post-Soviet discourse of victimhood appeals to nationalist nostalgia. The book's final chapter proposes that the Russian intelligentsia's fascination with the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky testifies to the persistent hold of sacrificial mythology in contemporary culture, while the conclusion addresses its most recent deployments in media coverage of the war in Ukraine, laws against US adoption of Russian children and propaganda of homosexuality among minors, renewed national pride in wartime heroes, and current usage of the phrase “sacred victim” in public discourse. In covering these cases, the book delineates the sacrificial language's trajectory from molding the individual to lending personality and authority to the Soviet and post-Soviet state.

My choice of examples is guided by their vividness and variety. While they span from the 1930s through the 2010s, my goal is not to cover the entire Soviet and post-Soviet time line but rather to identify a course in the development of the discourse about the sacred victim. This analysis engages with newspaper articles as well as fiction, memoirs, and film. Soviet print media was especially helpful in mapping out this trend as it reproduces ideology in a concise and repetitive manner while being highly reactive to changes in policy, official attitudes, and eschatology.