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The twentieth century was marked by unprecedented change and political contestation. Revolutions were followed by retreats. Cultural efflorescences gave way to periods of cruel repression. In many national and regional contexts where freezes were followed by thaws, societies were faced with the task of exhuming and grappling with the past, or dancing with bones that were never fully buried. This session will consider artworks from any region of Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia that tried to recuperate, revivify, or re-engage cultural formations that had previously been rejected or suppressed. This could include, but is not limited to, the recuperation of historic avant-garde strategies in the 1960s–70s, post-1989 ‘ostalgia’, or the return of Cosmism and other forms of utopian thinking in the 2000s. Can we conceptualize such returns via the model, advanced by Hal Foster, of traumatic nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action? Or does the pervasive erasure of the past and the archaeological task of recovery demand new methodological frameworks sensitive to the specificities of the region’s political and cultural histories? How do we conceive an artistic chronology that is alternately marked by forced curtailment and belated, necessarily partial revivification? Does the revival of a past present a tool for political praxis, or does that past’s original excision render it inert, a museum piece for contemplation or nostalgia? We seek theoretically grounded papers that offer concrete examples of cultural freezes and thaws from the region that address these or other questions related to displacement, erasure, and return.