PoSoCoMeS Seminar #28. Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine

Описание: PoSoCoMeS Online Seminar Series, session #28

At this PoSoCoMeS seminar, Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk discuss their book “Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine” (Central European University Press, February 2025) with Ekaterina Haskins and Yuliya Yurchuk.

About the book:

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.

Authors:

Mischa Gabowitsch, historian and sociologist, is Professor of Multilingual and Transnational Post-Soviet Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He holds a BA and MA from the University of Oxford and a DEA and PhD from the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, and previously held positions at the Universities of Princeton and Vienna as well as the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, in addition to visiting fellowships at institutes of advanced study in Madrid and Vienna. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and thematic journal issues in various languages on protest and social movements as well as memory and commemoration. These include, in English, The Russian Field: Views from Abroad (2011), Protest in Putin’s Russia (2016), Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities (2017), The Sociology of Belarusian Protest (2021), Beyond Representation: The Visual Analysis of History Textbooks and Other Educational Media (2023), and Protest and Authoritarian Reaction in Belarus (2023).

Mykola Homanyuk, sociologist, geographer and theatermaker, is an associate professor at Kherson State University. He graduated from N.K. Krupskaia Kherson State Pedagogical Institute and defended his PhD thesis in sociology at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. He has held a Lane Kirkland Fellowship at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, a fellowship at the Indiana University-Ukraine Nonresidential Scholars Program, and a fellowship at Petro Jacyk Non-Resident Scholars Program at the University of Toronto. Since 2022 he has been a member of the Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, and Memory research group at Forum Transregionale Studien and a member of the Contested Ukraine: Military Patriotism, Russian Influence, and Implications for European Security research group. Mykola is the author of numerous articles on mental mapping and toponomy, ethnic studies, as well as memory and commemoration. As a theatermaker he runs the Kherson Theatre Lab and directs documentary theater productions. In 2018 he was awarded the ADAMI Media Prize for Cultural Diversity in Eastern Europe.

Discussants:

Yuliya Yurchuk is an Associate Professor at Södertörn University, Sweden. She is a historian specialising in nationalism, memory, religion, history of knowledge and history of science and ideas, with the main focus on Ukraine, Eastern and Central Europe.

Ekaterina Haskins is a Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University, USA. Her expertise is in rhetoric, visual culture, and transnational memory studies.