ACCEA (Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art)
Yerevan, Angela
Angela Harutyunyan
Post-Cold War Narrations: The Historicity of Memorial Reflection and Reflective
Memory
In 2003 I curated the solo project of Hovhannes Margarian entitled “Crash # 60528” at the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art. The exhibition that was realized with collaboration with art critics and historians Vardan Azatyan and Vardan Jaloyan dealt with the shooting down of an American surveillance airplane on the territory of Soviet Armenia in 1958 and the post-Cold War reflections of the accident both on local and global levels. The current paper is a reflection on the incident and its cultural and political implications and is largely based on the exhibition materials.
Introduction
The end of the Cold War era was symbolically inaugurated by the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, in real life eliminating the traces of the old era was more laborious and difficult than breaking down the wall and commodifying its pieces as
relics. It was far more complicated than declaring the end of the old era by selling
souvenirs of its symbols in craft and tourist shops in Berlin. There had to be constant and often painful renegotiations and redefinitions than the politicians, as well as some ordinary citizens optimistic enough to greet the new era with full enthusiasm, originally expected. This is a moment when different local communities, affected by the “hot incidents” of the Cold War, once again found themselves as being “hot spots” in the process of negotiating the new world order. The re-evaluation of new world constellations and the desire to “reveal the truth” of many obscure incidents that took place during the Cold War, connected the local communities effected by these incidents with a global superstructure of world politics. In the research and field studies of actual sites where the incidents took place, the role of single witnesses became important once again. However, as Vardan Jaloyan asserts in his review of the exhibition, “the difference between the Cold War era and that of the “clash of civilizations” was that the single witness had already transformed into an anonymous spectator” whose memories of the ‘real event’ were constructed by the media and collective narratives, and where it was
subsequently no longer possible to distinguish between direct personal memory and a
collectively shaped narrative.
In this essay, I will examine two documents that deal with the shooting down of
an American surveillance airplane in Soviet Armenian airspace in 1958. None of the
documents deal with the incident as it happened and none of them were registered or
narrated when the incident took place. Both are post-Cold war reflections of the same
event coming from two different geographical locations and communities. The first is a memorial speech entitled “Grandpa Ferguson” delivered by one of the crash victim’s
grandsons on the occasion of the inauguration of the National Vigilance Park in Fort
Meade, Maryland, USA in 1997, dedicated to the 17 victims of the 1958 crash. The
second document I will be dealing with is an interview with an Armenian witness from
the village of Susnashen where the airplane came down, recorded in 2003 and displayed
in the project of Armenian artist Hovhannes Margarian entitled “Crash #60528” at the
Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art.
Through examining these two local reflections on an event of global significance,
as well as the two different ways that the local communities chose to commemorate the
same event, I will show how the two narratives – that of the Armenian villager and the American grandson, are shaped by meta-narratives of the post cold-war era. Specifically, through discussing the mentioned documents, I will elaborate as on how these narratives are related to, and shaped by, the meta-narratives of heroism, sacrifice and collective national purpose on the one hand, and by media images of war and catastrophe on the other.
For the conceptual framing of this paper, I chose to adopt Benedict Anderson’s
notion of ‘imagined communities’, particularly his elaboration of the role of personal sacrifice, collective remembering and amnesia and the formation of national narratives in the process of identity construction. 1 In my discussion of the function of the two memorials, one in the village of Sasnashen, the other in Fort Meade, and their role in collective memory and forgetting, I adopted Michael Rowlands’ concept of nationalist war memorials that “turn traumatic individual deaths into acts of national celebrations and heroic assertions of collective value.”
Grandpa Ferguson
In September 2, 1958 an American “Hercules” C-130 airplane which was carrying
out a reconnaissance mission along the border between Turkey and Soviet Armenia,
became disoriented by Soviet navigational beacons and instead of flying towards Lake
Van in Turkey where it was to finish its mission, crossed into Soviet airspace. After a few minutes of stand off, the airplane was shot down by Soviet Mig-17 pilots. All of the crew, 17 people died. Only the bodies of 6 crewmembers were identified and sent to the US where they were buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Up until 1993, when then Russian President Boris Yeltsin opened up the Soviet archives and a Russian-American joint commission was established to conduct research and reveal “the truth” about this and other similar incidents, Russians never admitted that they shot down the airplane. The official story was that it “crashed” in the Soviet territory. The Americans, in turn, never admitted that the airplane was carrying out a reconnaissance mission. With the establishment of the committee and opening up of the archives, the Sasneshen incident appeared on the horizon of global politics once again. The new interest that was created around the incident in 1990’s was an impetus for the locals of the Sasnashen village, where the airplane was shot down, to erect an Armenian Christian cross-stone, a khachkar, while the Americans inaugurated a Park in Fort Meade and placed a C-130
sister aircraft there to commemorate the event.
I will carry out my analysis of the documents in a chronological order; i.e. from
the speech by crew member James’ Ferguson’s grandson, M.J. Marsh, delivered on the
occasion of inaugurating the airplane-memorial dedicated to the victims of the 1958
incident. The speech starts with a reference to the inscription on the Armenian khachkar in the village of Sasnashen. By merely bringing up this inscription which contains an age-old adage about the price of freedom, Marsh brings the Armenian village, which would otherwise be left unknown and unnoticed, to world attention and into an international discourse of sacrifice and heroism.
Marsh never met “grandpa Ferguson,” but he has no doubts that the grandpa he
knows from the photographs, stories, as well as intelligence documents, is a national hero. In what follows, he ‘remembers’ his grandfather and turns him from a merely personal object of mourning into a universal property of the nation whose place is in the pantheon of heroes who have sacrificed their lives for the common good. Here the photograph that Marsh recalls acts only as one artifact amongst the many accumulated pieces of documentary evidence which “simultaneously record certain apparent continuums and emphasize its loss from memory." The photograph is both a source of memory and forgetting. As a documentary evidence of grandpa, it is the only access that Marsh has to his ancestor’s image. Nevertheless it is oblivious, because once recorded grandpa’s subjectivity is reduced to a single image in the pile of other intelligence documents or the details of family history; once recorded, it is forgotten. It also becomes an ornament in having no direct memory of grandpa’s epoch and for Marsh it is a type that represents the whole epoch; a mere synecdoche. However, as Benedict Anderson elaborates in his coverage of nations as imagined communities and the role of memory in this imagining, there is a certain estrangement between personal mourning and the triumphalism of national revival through sacrifice. Part of this estrangement comes from a conception of personhood, identity, which, because it cannot be ‘remembered’, must be narrated. This narration is culturally shaped and socially determined. The memory of the non-existing and unencountered relative is to a large extend mediated, and at the end shaped by those values that the culture and the narratives of nationhood ascribe to the concept of the hero. This realization of the transition from personal loss to universal sacrifice is violent, and manifests itself when the grandson leaves the photograph of his grandfather behind and turns to view a stack of documents that record the case and nominates him a “causality of the Cold War.” The memory of a close relative is recalled with the help of state documents making him realize, once again,
that personal mourning has also global and universal significance. However, the moment of transition, as mentioned, is violent because the grandson also realizes the finitude of his own life and the infinitude and universality of the nation.
According to Anderson, there is a huge difference between personal narratives and those of the nation. While a life of a person has a beginning and an end, nations have no clearly identified births, “and their deaths, if they ever happen, are never natural. To serve the narrative purpose, the violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as ‘our own. And it is this difference between what is profane (a person’s finite life) and what is sacred (a nation’s mythic origins and permanence) that causes this violence. For Durkheim, the sacred is what is
respected, the profane that which is mundane. The case that the grandpa Ferguson,
whose memory is constructed from personal stories of his everyday life in an everyday
life setting, is being transformed and located within the sacred world of remembering has to be mediated by the meta-narrative of “dying a purposeful death”. Nevertheless, this meta-narrative is not only a mediator but an end in itself as well, in that it ultimately shapes the memory from grandpa.
When Marsh states that his grandfather “is not only my hero but a national hero”,
it is obvious that his conception of a hero is shaped by dominant narratives of heroism and courage where the best hero is the dead hero. At the same time there is no difference between “my hero” and a “national hero” since being shaped by the later, the concept “my hero” is made identical to the concept of “national hero.” In Marsh’s speech, not only can we reconstruct the concept as shaped by the dominant narratives of nationhood and sacrifice, but we can trace the Cold war separation of “good guys and bad guys” as reflected in the language as well. Moreover, he directly borrows from the terminology of the CIA and adopts its jargon in order to describe the circumstances of his grandfather’s death. Here, the personal story is mediated by the language of state agency. He also borrows from the inscription about the cost of freedom on the Armenian khachkar when he moralizes the story of his grandfather’s death. As with the concept of the hero that is historically and socially specific but reified in the national narratives of death and sacrifice, a grand universal value is assigned to the concept of freedom as well. Indeed, this concept is the one that directly connects the Armenian village with the American community. Whatever specific connotations it has had within the Armenian context as inscribed on the khachkar, it is taken as universal by the American heir of the dead cryptographer.
The war and sacrifices are remembered within a society through institutionalization and dissemination of memory through media, museums, academia as well as through memorials dedicated to selective instances and heroes of the collective past and present. For the ‘heroes’ to be remembered, this institutionalization of memory and forgetting through memorials, which Katie Trumpener calls the “bureaucratization of
death,” has to take place. The creation of an official historical landscape that becomes a part of people’s everyday life is, at the same time, detached from the profane world and is a constant reminder of a collective identity constructed upon the victories and losses in the historical development of a community. Marsh’s speech is delivered in a place which is made sacred because of this very act of commemoration, in the National Vigilance Park, where a memorial dedicated to the 17 cryptographers of the C-130 airplane is erected. The memorial is the sister-airplane, a replica of the original one that was shot down by the Soviet pilots.
The function of the memorials is to both make the community remember and
forget about an event or a person. They reduce the war or a sacrifice to a single
representational aspect, an image which is the symbolic expression of both the
remembering and forgetting of the community. The American community chose to
commemorate the event with a form where the signifier and the signified are
indistinguishable; i. e. the airplane that was downed is commemorated by constructing an identical airplane which is being de-contextualized and turned into a memorial. If we follow Arthur Danto’s distinction of memorials and monuments where the first embraces remembrance through healing and reconciliation, while the second signifies the triumph of victory, we could say that the airplane is both a memorial and a monument. Once the mourning at the site of commemoration reaches its successful completion, memorials become monuments in order to signify the triumphalist continuity of life through death.
Grandpa Ferguson and 16 other crew members joined the anonymous hundreds and
thousands of ‘causalities of the Cold War” and their death is presented as a purposeful step towards the ultimate goal of protecting the national cause. By virtue of this universal value attached to it, this ‘conscious’ death, unlike the ‘private and undesired death’ of an individual, is honorable. As Michael Rowlands comments: “War memorials, in their capacity to represent traumatic deaths as an outcome of self-sacrifice, become objects of contestation” where memory and amnesia are at stake. Thus, monuments become a visual form that successfully transform anguish and suffering into something else - a form of communal justification that go beyond the individual trauma. The airplane which is both an enemy’s weapon and the cause of death of these cryptographers, is put on a pedestal and turned into a monument, a kind of object of worship. By this, it gains a religious significance, the same way that the cross, the enemy’s weapon of killing Christ which, at the same time rescues, became sacred. The underlying religious significations
concealed by the seemingly secular narratives of nationhood and state building become
more obvious once the ritualistic commemoration and mourning is completed and the
memorial is turned into a monument.
Beyond the Iron Curtain: Witnesses’ Accounts
The post-Cold War constellations also provided the community of the Armenian
villagers an opportunity to openly commemorate the 17 dead cryptographers of the 1958
crash. However, unlike for the American community, the crash did not have the same
cathartic function of reasserting the national cause and re-evaluating the sacrifices made during the Cold War in the face of the beginning of a new, global era. Being on the other side of the iron curtain, the villagers’ community in Sasnashen, directly influenced by the global political changes that the world was facing in the 1990’s, perceived this incident as a chance to place itself on the world map through global news media. The post-cold war saying in Armenia that a country, a geographical entity or a community does not exist unless broadcast on CNN, becomes a true story in the history of this small village. If it was not an incident of global significance, the village would have never received the
attention of even Armenian officials. However, when the village was re-discovered again in the 1990’s with the investigation of the airplane crash, many things had already changed and eyewitness’ account were no longer taken as objective and reliable.
The memories of the witnesses of the 1958 incident had already partially faded
away and been transformed not only because of the temporal distance and forced oblivion of the Cold War era, but also because of the fusing of the witnesses’ direct visual experience of the crash with the array of subsequently consumed news and media images of similar events. The villager in a video interview with Armenian artist Hovhannes Margaryan in 2003, starts out with a personal account of skipping classes as a school kid and running to the lower canyon to avoid teachers’ punishment. The incident that took place that day turned a mundane activity that would probably be forgotten in the course of many years, into an event of special significance. The routine of the internal village life is punctuated by an intrusion which comes in the form of an airplane that contrasts with what the villagers see and experience in their immediate environment. By this very intrusion, the village finds itself encountering modernity; an airplane which is a symbol of technological advancement infringes on the life of a small and traditional mountainous
village. According to the villager’s account, first an awkward but safe explanation is found by an elder boy who interprets the airplane stand off as a military maneuver or exercise. This tells us on the one hand that military exercises were common in Soviet times, and on the other hand, that the safe interpretation of the elder boy was shaped by the Soviet propaganda of the inviolability and impregnability of Soviet territorial integrity. The fascination of the whole scene is expressed in the language that the villager uses to describe an event that happened forty five years ago. The detailed description of the incident where the villager even ‘remembers’ observing which airplane fired first in the sky, once again proves that, even for the witness, the event is no longer a
merely direct personal experience. The oral story of the incident has, of course, been retold and circulated among the villagers in the course of many years. They have already formed a collective version of the story which is no longer about the evidence of a single witness. This story, constructed through media images of other wars and other airplanes, and along with other stories of the village’s heroic past, becomes a part of the village’s history passed down through oral tradition. Due to the KGB’s constant surveillance this story has been evolving more or less secretly being confined within the boundaries of the village. After the Cold War it once again belongs to the villager’s community and their act of publicity represents an act of the collective emancipation of memory. In villager’s account, one can hear a certain degree of disappointment that a few hours after the incident, the story was taken away from the villagers, and their first-hand experience of witnessing the crash was undermined first by the police, soldiers and investigators that surrounded the site who did not allow the villagers to approach it, and then finally by world politics.
It was only in 1993, after a long period of silence that the villagers were allowed
to mourn the dead pilots of the 1958’s accident. However, unlike the American
community, the inhabitants of the village of Sasnashen were not commemorating the
victims as American national heroes whose individuality was dissolved within a larger
narrative of sacrifice for the nation. Neither were they viewing the incident in the context of global confrontations between power states, or as a worldwide problem that would influence international relations. For the locals, the incident was more of an event which was a “curios episode” in their everyday life. It was also a reason to be proud that their village appeared in the midst of “important” international developments. Villagers approached the incident from a very personalized point of view, as a tragic fate of separate individuals as human beings, and the memorial founded by the villagers in 1993 was a tomb or a gravestone rather than an abstract monument to the “unknown hero.” As Vardan Jaloyan puts it very vividly in his review: “the witness, was of the same age as the child-hero from Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” when the airplane was shot down. As for Spielberg’s hero, the airplane is a subject of attraction for our hero as well. The process of shooting down the airplane lasted a few minutes. It took place against the background of the sky, and had the appearance of a religious vision. It
is not accidental that the inhabitants put a cross stone on the place of the accident”. The remnants of the airplane that remained in the site long after the crash were subjects of attraction and fascination as well. The choice of the visual form of the memorial dedicated to the victims was connected to this personal fascination as well as the appropriation of the foreign dead cryptographers as “ours.” They were not perceived as anonymous people who died in carrying out their duty but were referred to as “our dead
boys.”
The khachkar, a cross stone dedicated to the dead, has a long tradition in
Armenian funeral art. Originally having religious meaning and dedicated to the martyrs of Christendom, it changed its specific and narrowly religious meaning through the centuries and came to stand as a funeral stone in general. Khachkars were erected by a secular or religious community and were normally devoted to those dead who accomplished certain significant deeds during their lifetime. The death of remarkable individuals that contributed to the community was sacralized through these khachkars. These cross stones always remain memorials, never turning into monuments, as the process of mourning, unlike the case of the American monument, is never complete. It does not belong solely to the sacred world but is as much a part of the profane world as well. The duty to mourn is passed from generation to generation by the force of tradition. Those that do not have direct memories connected to the dead person are supposed to remember him not only through oral stories, but also through inscriptions on khachkars that constantly remind them to mourn. These never become triumphalist reminders of victories or continuation of life through death, but are only mementos of life’s finitude and its ephemeral nature.
For the villagers the narrative of the crash was shaped by media images and other
visual narratives starting from international news to Hollywood action movies. Their
fascination with what is Western, what comes from the outside, in the context that their view of the world could not extend beyond the Iron Curtain for several decades, includes both the airplane and the media images. For the witness, these two dissolve in the direct experience of the crash and produce a narrative where the truth is as false as the fictional is truthful.
Conclusion
The institutionalization of the meta-narratives of collective memory and
forgetting are highly selective processes effected by power relations. Within the
ideological framework of a united nation, local communities are encouraged to adopt
these meta- narratives and identify with them. This is where a particular individual, a person that lost his life ‘serving the nation’ is no longer a physical body that is ‘left behind in a foreign field’. Instead, it turns into an idealized icon, cleansed of transitory weakness and moral stain. Grandpa Ferguson no longer belongs merely to a narrow family history. There are universalized values of heroism and self-sacrifice attached to his one time particular identity because the mode of death that he “chose” fitted within the constructed American meta-narrative of what a hero ought to be and is. He is turned into an abstract figure because the memories of those who commemorate him are directly shaped by the bureaucratic evidence that “discloses the details of his death” (and not of his life!) as well by the meta- narrative of heroic sacrifice in the face of the threats of a common enemy. On the other hand, it is the fear of the relatives that an absolute
forgetting will take place and thus, if the facts and events of his death are left in the past, they no longer will constitute a present. Michael Rowlands poses a rhetorical question: “What is it that the living give to the dead?” to which he answers: “In a sense, it is the remembering of names and actions as real events that constitutes the sacrificial act by compressing both past and future in the present.”
Unlike Marsh, the villager in Sasnashen witnessing the crash has direct memories
of the incident and of the deaths that took place there. However, for him, grandpa
Ferguson is neither an individual nor an abstract national hero. Up until the early 1990s,the villagers did not even know the names of the dead cryptographers because the U. S. State Department on the one hand, and the Soviet KGB on the other, refused to disclose any information. Being on the other side of the curtain, for them there was nothing heroic about “dying in enemy land.” In actuality, they did not even perceive them as enemies either, because for them the Cold War was mostly about inter-state hostilities. For the people behind the iron curtain, what was Western had a shiny and seductive quality and even if they witnessed a cold war incident, this war indeed remained ‘cold’. The airplane crash, recalled 45 years after the incident, was transformed into a totally different narrative, shaped by a meta-narrative distinct from the one which influenced Marsh’s speech. This was shaped by news images as well as that of Hollywood movies that intruded from the other side of the curtain into the villagers’ life after the end of the Cold War; the same way that the airplane infringed into their lives forty five years ago. Again, as Vardan Jaloyan puts it, “Today, the event is defined by
the means of “registering” it”. That is, the incident is created by the media and not by the evidence or experience of its witnesses. While for Marsh, evidence was transformed into a narrative in the process of mourning, for the villager, from narrative it was transformed to the level of the visual media. In both cases, however, the event is mediated by different meta-narratives that reflect specific power constellations on a meta- level, be it global politics, the state, the nation or international media. The local narratives of both the Armenian villagers and the American community are constructed along the lines of these value forming contexts. At the same time, an event of global resonance is what connects these local communities together. It is not the real event by itself that created
these ties and common associations. Instead, it was its post-Cold War reflection,
provoked by world politics and the media that shaped the villager’s account and then
broadcast it for international consumption. It was the media that disseminated the local narratives and made Marsh aware of the khachkar erected in a small Armenian village.
Bibliography
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