Monuments and Territory

From the very first days of their large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian invaders have made exceptional efforts to interact with the war memorial landscape of the newly occupied territories. This landscape consists of tens of thousands of monuments, mostly in small towns and villages, commemorating the Second World War and other conflicts, including Ukraine’s resistance against Russia since 2014. The Russians have destroyed some of these memorials, renovated others, and built new monuments amid continued fighting. They also used war memorials in countless propaganda photos and videos aimed for a domestic audience and largely escaping Western attention.

Why this fervor? Gabowitsch and Homanyuk draw on unique sources to trace the logic of Russian monument policies in occupied Ukraine. Mykola Homanyuk spent several months in occupied Kherson and collected sources on the ground, often at considerable risk to himself. This exceptional wartime on-site ethnography was complemented by systematic real-time data collection from online sources, many of which have since disappeared. The book shows how Russian invaders believed their own propaganda about Soviet war memorials being mistreated in Ukraine, and what they did when they discovered well-maintained monuments on the ground. More generally, it also discusses the link between monuments and territorial claims by irredentist empires.

Mischa Gabowitsch, historian and sociologist, is Professor of Multilingual and Transnational Post-Soviet Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford and the EHESS in Paris, and previously held positions in Princeton, Potsdam, and Vienna. He is the author or editor of numerous books in various languages, including Protest in Putin’s Russia (2016) and Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities (2017).

Mykola Homanyuk, sociologist, geographer, and theatermaker, is an associate professor at Kherson State University, Ukraine. He defended his PhD thesis in sociology at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Since 2022 he has been a member of the Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, and Memory research group. Mykola is the author of numerous articles on mental mapping, ethnic studies, as well as memory and commemoration. As a theatermaker he runs the Kherson Theater Lab.