Cultural vs. collective trauma: The memorialization of Soviet repression in post-Soviet Armenia modeled on genocide remembrance

The article provides a comparative analysis of the two types of memory, collective and cultural (Aierman 2013), using the examples of initiatives to erect monuments to the repressed in Armenia and the memory of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, respectively. The material under discussion was mainly collected during field research in 2013-2016 but was also supplemented by the author's auto-ethnographic observations as a participant in some of the commemorations and protests presented. The aim of the article is to trace how practices of collective trauma memorialization coexist and interact in a society that is also a carrier of cultural trauma. The memory of two traumatic historical events, depending on their public representation, not only occupies completely different niches in matters of national identity, but also engages in a certain interaction between them. In this case, the trauma of the genocide provides the toolkit for memorial initiatives about other tragic events, modelling not so much the politics of remembrance as the opposition to the politics of oblivion (cf. Assmann 2019; Connerton 2008). The memorials to the repressed erected as a result of local initiatives reflect a claim by agents of counter-memory to public space, to the right to assert their collective trauma that has not become cultural. At the same time, in the absence of an official memorial canon for this historical subject, its marginalization received more freedom for interpretations and translation of differences into public space. Monuments erected because of local initiatives can combine several functions and more often serve not so much as a memorial (reminder) as a locus of memory (space of co/experience).