Victory Banner Over the Reichstag: Film, Document and Ritual in Russia's Contested Memory of World War II
... Then, for the first time in nearly 20 years, official celebrations of Victory Day were held. In the following years, the full-fledged cult of the war emerged in the Soviet Union (on various aspects of this cult, see Tumarkin 1994;Merridale 2006;Davis 2018;Hicks 2020). By the beginning of Perestroika, the war had taken the place of the 1917 Revolution as the country's founding historical event (Boltunova 2017). ...
That Putin’s regime has been able to put the memory of the Great Patriotic War (GPW) to political use is hardly news to any observer of Russia. What is often overlooked, however, is that the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has contributed to the instrumentalization of this memory by the Kremlin. In this article, I aim to bridge this gap. Drawing on an analysis of the ROC’s commemorative activities, I reconstruct the specific, martyrological, interpretation of the GPW that it is forging. With sin, atonement, and glory as its central concepts, this interpretation invests the suffering and losses of the GPW with patriotic sense. Thus, it turns the politically problematic traumatic memory of the GPW into a politically useful one. Simultaneously, it is consistent with the triumphant cult of the GPW advanced by the Kremlin. It also perfectly suits the statist historical narrative focused on the continuity of Russia’s past, which is crucial for the ideology of Putin’s regime. Furthermore, this interpretation does not contradict the Soviet memory of the GPW that the regime relies on. Finally, in combining Orthodox Christianity with militarism, the martyrological interpretation of the GPW is highly suitable for the regime’s political business of the day, which is waging its war against Ukraine.
... By contrast, the mystery of why the Soviets were willing to show the human body, the corpses of victims of the Nazis so widely in 1941, in a bid to depict the violence inflicted on them and win the sympathy of the worldthe question as to what precedent might they have been drawing onis possibly explained by the whole episode of film depictions of the Volga famine where this approach was widespread. 108 It was an enduring memory that coloured Soviet attitudes across a number of spheres for many years to come. ...
In February 1922, the Save the Children Fund released a short documentary film, Famine, as part of their campaign to raise money for famine relief in Russia. The enormously successful campaign itself and this use of film are widely seen as a significant moment in the history of modern humanitarianism. However, while this was not the first or only film made about the Russian Famine in this period, most previous scholarship has treated Famine as such, in the context of the history of humanitarianism in Britain or humanitarian film. This article argues that an analysis of other earlier films suggests they were also factors influencing the making of Famine. The first of these films was the Russian documentary Remember the Starving (Pomnite o golodaiushchikh) released in September 1921 and screened as part Soviet Russia’s own relief efforts; a version of this was shown from January 1922 by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen in his European lecture tour. This film in turn was prepared by the German-based, Communist-led aid organisation, Workers’ International Relief. The newsreels also depicted the famine, in issues released in the USA from October 1921, but not screened in Britain. The article argues that Famine was made to fill this gap, but also as a distinctly humanitarian film response to the wider international films, and that the films taken together mark an important, hitherto neglected moment in the emergence of documentary film.
... Iconic images of victory enjoyed long afterlives, becoming cultural icons which subsequently structured war memories. Apart from Evgenii Khaldei's influential photographs of the Victory Banner being raised above the Reichstag, the role of photography in shaping the Soviet Union's post-war reconstruction has been largely unexplored (Hicks, 2020). In 2010 the editors of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History encouraged scholars, 'to work towards a more informed position of how particular societies expressed themselves in visual culture: what their visual resources were, how they were deployed, and to what social and political ends' (Anon, 2010: 217-20). ...
This article explores the photographs taken of the Red Army’s homecoming in the summer 1945. It examines what these reveal about post-war reconstruction and the re-establishment of communities. It argues that official demobilization photography was a carefully constructed and highly politicized attempt to visualize veterans’ reintegration, which subsequently structured war memory. The research is based on two forms of primary evidence, first the photographs and the visual evidence they contain, and second textual sources, including press accounts and archival documents, which reveal how these photographs were taken. The article examines the visual vocabularies and messages in photographs of soldiers departing from Berlin, and soldiers’ arrival in major cities, particularly Moscow and Leningrad. These images, for all their emotional power, were not representative of mass demobilization, but have been widely reproduced. Demobilization photography communicated important messages about post-war reconstruction, the reimposition of post-war gender norms, helping re-order and create post-war society.
This paper seeks to enhance memory studies' conceptual toolkit by reconsidering established perspectives on “memory politics.” The paper theorizes various modes of temporal connectivity cultivated through politicized references to a shared past. Our empirical case is focused on a collection of roughly 5.000 recent articles about the war in Ukraine from major Russian state-aligned news outlets. We analyze and typologize the narrative and rhetorical gestures by which these articles make the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” and the post-Soviet “special military operation” speak to one another, both prior to and following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The analysis demonstrates that even in contemporary Russia's tightly controlled, propagandistic mass media ecology, politicized uses of memory foster diverse temporal structures within the propaganda narratives. We present a typology of these relations, mapping the distinct modes and intensities of connections between past and present. At one end of the spectrum, we identify a mode of temporal organization that presents past events and figures as fully detached from the present, available solely for historiographic reflection. At the other end, we find narratives that entirely collapse historical distance, addressing contemporary audiences as participants in a timeless war drama, with stakes that transcend any specific historical period. We propose that the presented typology may be applicable beyond our specific case. As a tool for analyzing the hitherto understudied organization of time in politicized articulations of memory, it could be employed in various cultural and political contexts. Furthermore, our approach can serve as a foundation for future research into the actual persuasive and affective impact that specific temporal modalities may have on their target audiences.
How do great-power leaders instrumentalise humanitarianism in sustain-ing the institutional and public mandate demanded by their war agendas?We examine the ‘humanitarian securitisation’ approach adopted bypowerful state leaders as the domestic credibility and popularity of theirwar efforts become increasingly more difficult to guarantee over time. Wedefine humanitarian securitisation as a discursive-hermeneutic processthrough which powerful initiator states frame the humanitarian crisesarising from the terrorism and internal conflicts confronting less powerfultarget states as existential threats to the former’s own survival to bolsterand justify their agendas further. Using Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and Putin’sUkraine invasion as empirical cases, we argue that the humanitariansecuritisation resulting from the artificial insertion of humanitarianisminto the securitisation process becomes a double-edged sword that rein-forces the legitimising and mobilising powers required by great-powerleaders to pursue their narrow self-interests, but at the risk of beingentangled into long drawn-out wars that damage genuine humanitarianefforts. In framing these ‘extraterritorial’ humanitarian crises as collectiveborderless existential threats that all parties affected must decisivelydefeat, this ad hoc and predatory process of humanitarian securitisationalters the form and substance of contemporary humanitarianism in a waythat ultimately exacerbates existing power hierarchies.
Andrei Andreevich Vlasov, a Soviet general who sought to create a Russian Liberation Army under German auspices during World War II, has been the focal point of debates about wartime collaboration that reflect deep divides in memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Stalin era in post-Soviet Russia. Memory entrepreneurs in the literary world, the Orthodox Church and the historical profession have reappropriated Vlasov, inserting him in anti-Soviet historical narratives as a hero, symbol or martyr. Meanwhile, patriotic intellectuals in the Putin years have invoked Vlasov as a figure of national treachery and use him to discredit their political opponents. The debate over Vlasov points to the fractured and unproductive nature of national collective memory in Russia.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.