Instrumentalizing the Past: Popular Music Heritage and Power in Illiberal Contexts

The panel examined how popular music heritage becomes a tool of public history in illiberal and authoritarian contexts across the post-socialist space. While public history is often associated with museums, monuments, and formal education, the panel foregrounded sound, performance, and affective memory as important arenas in which historical narratives are produced, negotiated, and contested. The papers explored how music can function both as a vehicle for political legitimation and as a medium through which communities articulate resistance, alternative identities, and counter-histories.

Across Eastern Europe, political actors mobilize selective visions of the past—from imagined pre-modern ancestries to the Soviet legacy—to reinforce nationalist and civilizational narratives. Musical heritage is particularly effective in this respect because it is emotionally powerful, widely accessible, and embedded in everyday life. At the same time, its vernacular and intimate character allows fans, artists, and activists to reinterpret the past in ways that challenge or complicate official narratives. This tension between ideological appropriation and grassroots reinterpretation formed the central theme of the panel.

Indira Hajnacs (University of Szeged/GWZO) presented Loosers in the West, Stars in the East – (Perverse) Decolonisation and the (Re)Invention of the Steppe Music Tradition in Hungary. Her paper examined how Hungarian musicians draw on imagined steppe traditions and Central Asian motifs to construct narratives of “Eastern roots,” and how these practices intersect with illiberal political projects positioning Hungary against the West.

Lizaveta Lysenka (Bonn University) presented Soviet, Western or Belarusian: Entanglements of Meaning and Heritagization of the Music Band “Pesniary” before and after 1991. She explored the competing interpretations of Pesniary’s Soviet–Western–Belarusian heritage, showing how the band is mobilized both by the Belarusian state and by democratic movements in contrasting narratives of national identity and belonging.

Alexandra Kolesnik (Bielefeld University) presented Rock Heritage Between Memory and Militarization: Contested Legacies of Viktor Tsoi in Russia. The paper examined how Viktor Tsoi’s legacy has become a contested site of memory in contemporary Russia. While his image and music have increasingly been incorporated into patriotic and militarized narratives, grassroots fan communities continue to sustain alternative memories through vernacular memorials and commemorative practices.