Disturbing the sound of silence: towards the thick vision of the long Soviet silence

In a recent essay in Memory Studies, Paul Connerton distinguishes seven types of forgetting â- from repressive erasure through to forgetting as planned obsolescence or humiliated silence (2008: 59). He suggests that there could be many more kinds but his provisional taxonomy is, undoubtedly, an important and welcome step in breaking up the monolithic meanings of certain key words in trauma studies. An equally nuanced and differentiated view is necessary when we speak of being silent about, and in response to, the collectively shared experiences of terror. This paper seeks to begin this work of differentiated and attentive listening to silence by, on one hand, zeroing in on several historically specific, content and context-rich cultures of silence operating within the Soviet Union and, on the other hand, by tentatively reaching out to the knowledges garnered by performance studies in relation to questions of silence, performance, body and listening. I am not interested in this paper in attempting to classify and catalogue. Much like in a sound check, as opposed to a performance, I am concerned here with testing out a range of registers and, essentially, sounding things out. When I speak about a particular kind of silence, I imagine myself plucking a string and listening for a while. This approach, rather some form of intellectual pouncing on the subject at hand, seems to me to be a fitting way to start.