Monuments and Territory

Auteur

Mischa Gabowitsch is a Lise Meitner Fellow at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET), University of Vienna. He is the past editor-in-chief of the Moscow-based journal Neprikosnovenny zapas and founding editor-in-chief of Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research. Mykola Homanyuk is an associate professor at the Kherson State University. Since 2022 he has been a member of the Contested Ukraine: Military Patriotism, Russian Influence and Implications for European Security research group.

Texte du rabat

From the very first weeks of Russia's large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, Russian soldiers, politicians, and proxy administrators expended considerable effort interacting with monuments on newly occupied territory. Why did the invaders care enough about war memorials to divert scarce resources to destroying, maintaining, or building them amid a massive war? Why did they remove some memorials and spare others? What was the point of commemorating past victories and defeats while bombing Ukrainian cities, and how did commemorative ceremonies in the occupied territories

change over the first year of the war? What was the broader impact of monument-related practices beyond the local settings in which they occurred? And what does the Ukrainian case teach us more generally about how memorials to past wars can be used to justify new conquests? These are some of the questions this book explores, based on fieldwork in occupied Ukraine and online research.