![]() The debates reflect the way in which the Immortal Regiment , who posits that such a culture can help people “to reach from the personal to the collective” (Thelen 1998)? 2 Should it be read as a symptom of the post-Crimean militarization of Russian society, or a healthy sign of a grassroots revival of family memory (see Reut 2016)? Does it represent a shift away from the heroic Victory cult towards a new emphasis on mourning the war’s victims (Starikov 2015b), or is it rather a “mass death cult” reflecting a morbid fixation on the dead (Babchenko 2016)? What is the relationship between this movement to commemorate the victims of war and the forgetting of the victims of state terror (see Bessmertnyi barak n.d)? 1 Is the movement doomed to be “bureaucratized” and taken over by the state, or might it, on the contrary, potentially mark the new beginnings of an independent civil society in Russia based on shared respect for the value of human life, representing a nascent participatory historical culture, perhaps along the lines described by David Thelen Has sparked lively online and offline discussions over the meaning, the ethics, and the aesthetics of the new ritual. Clearly, this is a movement that enjoys massive popularity and that represents a significant shift in the way in which Russia’s war dead are commemorated, and yet the nature and meaning of this shift remains a very open question. “Never before,” the BPR website proclaims, “has the meaning and grandeur of the Victory holiday been revealed so completely and deeply” (BPR n.d). The BPR’s organizers argue that this movement represents “a new reading” of the Soviet Victory in the war (ibid.). Noted, more than thirty million if you count the dead who took part (cited Golubeva 2015b). Of Russia” (BPR) movement Nikolai Zemtsov On Victory Day 2015 reportedly reached twelve million, or, as self-appointed leader of the “Immortal Regiment SeeAlso SeeAlsoImmortal Regiment of Russia The number of people taking part in the Immortal Regiment , and President Putin himself joined the parade, bearing a photograph of his father. As part of the celebrations, the Regiment was granted permission to march across the country’s most sacred war memory site, Red Square Made its most spectacular debut during the 2015 jubilee Victory Day celebrations marking the 70th anniversary Bobbing above the heads of the marchers, the deceased ancestors are brought back to life, and their gathering together makes for an impressive spectacle, enabling a kind of visualization of the otherwise unimaginably huge losses sustained by the Soviet Union They reproduce the photos, making enlarged copies that are then laminated, mounted onto little placards on sticks, and carried overhead by the participants in procession. In this new ritual, participants take their ancestors’ photographs out of their family albums or cardboard boxes, or off the wall at home. ” parade, people march bearing photographs of their ancestors who fought or otherwise served the Soviet war effort in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. In the newly invented annual “Immortal Regiment Victory over Nazi Germany were marked by the arrival of a new mass commemorative ritual, a striking addition to the repertoire of Victory Day traditions in post-Soviet space. The 2015 jubilee celebrations of the Red Army’s
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