Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2018, no. 14

BY THE PEOPLE’S HANDS: THE SLEDOPYT MOVEMENT IN THE USSR OF THE 1960–80S

Ekaterina Melnikova
European University at St Petersburg
6/1A Gagarinskaya Str., St Petersburg, Russia
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences
3 Universitetskaya Emb., St Petersburg, Russia
melek()eu.spb.ru

Abstract: The paper is concerned with the development of the search movement in the USSR and aims at two main goals: to recover the contradictions in the relationship between the sledopyty (pathfinders) and the state in the 1960–80s, and to identify the inherent mechanisms of the movement which shaped its role and significance in the everyday life of the Soviet people in the Brezhnev era. The article is broken into several sections focused on memorial politics towards the war burials which provoked the first searching initiatives in the post-war Soviet Union, the subsequent political instrumentalisation of the searching movement and the forms of the everyday pathfinders’ activity reconstructed via the archival materials of the provincial Red Pathfinders Club. The Soviet war commemoration campaign relied on the transference of commemorative roles to local activists who served to legitimise the national war memory being not only vox populi but rather manus populi — the nation’s hands which created their own memory. The results of such a politics were similar to the other cases of the state-supported social movements in the 1960–80s and provided for development of social activity on grassroots level followed by the discovery and revision of local history. The searchers became the key war history experts on the local ground and the principal agents of local commemoration keeping the prescribed official status of voluntary youth organisations with only entertaining and educational goals. The Soviet memorial politics controversies made for creation of a fundamental rupture between the searchers and the state which still remains vital until today.

Keywords: searchers, red pathfinders, anthropology of memory, history of the stagnation, social movements, USSR.

To cite: Melnikova E., ‘By the People’s Hands: The Sledopyt Movement in the USSR of the 1960–80s’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2018, no. 14, pp. 107–136.

doi: 10.31250/1815-8927-2018-14-14-107-136

URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/eng014/melnikova.pdf