How to be ethically nostalgic
Like many people (most 40 or over?) I get nostalgia. Sometimes it takes weird forms. For example re-consuming media that I first watched or read as a very young child. That part's not the weird part. The weird part is this is most likely to be in Russian and with an explicitly Soviet bent.
Some of it would sound absolutely ridiculous described from the outside. For example, a rousing speech about how communists would not be cowards and open the hatch to commit suicide in a very long interstellar flight because the decades long journey would be "too much for them", from The Magellanic Cloud by Stanisław Lem.
Now objectively I know stuff like this doesn't stand the test of time. And it's not like I agree with any of the pro-Soviet stuff in those works. It's not like the Soviet Union was actually that worker-positive for example. And of course there's the background of mass murder and genocide being an implicit throughline in all of those works.
So what am I nostalgic for then?
I'm nostalgic for the childhood feeling that I had when consuming such works. That the Soviet Union was a country with great ideals of equality, helping people overcome oppression, bettering humanity. That it was standing up against a hostile world that was basically evil (outside the USSR that is). That eventually good will triumph over evil and there will be communism across the world.
I'm nostalgic for the feeling of hope and positiveness that I had as a child. It doesn't matter that it was based on things that were false, I had that hope and now as a 40 year old things are a lot more complicated/jaded. I don't for a second think that these feelings are based on some golden age that genuinely happened. That would be silly right? That would just be reifying my own fee-fees and projecting them out onto reality.
I don't give myself heaps of credit but I think I have worked out how to do nostalgia ethically. I have my fee-fees, but I understand that nostalgia is about them, not reality. The same would apply for pretty much all nostalgia.