Abstract or Keywords
This article investigates nostalgia and public memory in the 1996 Russian presidential elections. I argue that Gennadii Zyuganov and Boris Yeltsin offered condensation symbols that made either nostalgic or dystalgic appeals to the audience regarding the Soviet era in Russian history, and that the candidates discursively tried to establish the extent of Zyuganov's and communism's relevance in the future through temporal narratives. Through a combination of such appeals and narratives, the candidates offered a series of selective remembrances that suggested competing but incomplete and over-simplified characterizations of the nature of the Soviet past.