Toward a historical understanding of post-soviet presentism

Abstract

The chapter problematizes the dominant conceptualizations and periodizations of the contemporary presentism as a quality of post-historical time that has arrived with the demise of the Berlin Wall. By engaging with recent debates on the historicity of the present and the quality of time in the contemporary, the chapter presents the argument that, if considered from the Soviet historical experience, presentism - as the quality of the historical time marked by the omnipresence of the present - doesn’t simply arise out of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991. Instead, the chapter argues that in the post-Soviet condition, and if considered from the perspective of the Soviet historical experience, contemporary presentism intertwines the disintegration of three temporal orders: the long processes of the disintegration of the Bolshevik revolutionary project; Stalinist presentism defined by the freezing of the revolutionary dialectic in the space of the Soviet State as a permanent formation, and the neoliberal regime of temporality where time stands still in the order of deadlines, fiscal “futures, " exploitation of nature, and the looming planetary ecological catastrophe.