The Fallen Hero Writes a Letter to the Future: On Different Voices in Soviet Commemorative Practices of the 1960s

The article deals with a pattern of Soviet civil rituals of the 1960s where a soldier killed at the WWII was “given” a personal voice to address the living. In an atheist state, listening to the voices of the dead should not have been a conventional metaphor; however, the organizers of these ritual performances took what was happening as seriously as possible. The article focuses upon the story of three such “letters to the future” written for the so‑called “time capsule” in 1967. These letters were created by members of the Novorossiysk teenage club “Schooner of Peers” on behalf of the teenagers who volunteered for the WWII and died there. These letters offer a frame of communication between the deceased teenagers of the 1940s and the yet‑to‑be‑born teenagers of the 2010s. The paper considers the case as an example of Soviet ritualized speech. Drawing on Erwing Goffman’s theory of “social voice”, the article places the practices of speaking on behalf of the dead in the broader context of late Soviet state‑building practices that used the figures of dead young volunteers to promote the concept of the “unpaid debt of the living to the dead.”