A central theme of my current research is the history of Soviet practices of war commemoration—especially, but not exclusively, those associated with May 9, known as Victory Day in the Soviet and post-Soviet tradition. This has grown out of my work on the history of Soviet war memorials. In the archives I kept coming across textual and visual sources on commemorative practices in the 1940s and 50s which contradicted the widely held view that Stalin had scrapped Victory Day in 1947 and there was no state-sanctioned commemoration of the Second World War (or Great Patriotic War) until 1965. I started working on the history of commemorative practices, using sources from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus: documents from state archives, a database I put together of newspaper articles in different languages from the regional press in three republics, and ego-documents (memoirs, diaries, letters). I am currently working on a book that traces the history of Victory Day from the beginnings to the present. It is intended as a companion volume to the book on the history of Soviet war memorials that I am also writing. On a theoretical level I am especially interested in performative aspects of commemoration and in the materiality of war memorials (the hardware of memory, in Alexander Etkind’s terms) as opposed to the narratives of memory that have been the focus of most research on these matters.
The most detailed result of my work on this so far is presented in a recent English-language book chapter. On this page I have collected my publications on the topic in English, French, German, and Russian, as well as audio and video recordings of talks and discussions in different languages on the history of Soviet war commemoration. There is some overlap with the much more comprehensive bibliography and collection of video and audio recordings on the sociology of war commemoration, since many of my texts, talks, and interviews discuss both.
My work on the history of Soviet commemorative practices has been supported by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture, the German Historical Institute in Moscow, the German-Ukrainian Historical Commission, and the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst.
Articles
- „Victory Day before the Cult: War Commemoration in the USSR, 1945-65″ . In: David L. Hoffmann (ed.): The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. P. 64-85.
- « Le 8/9 mai ». In: Korine Amacher, Eric Aunoble, Andrii Portnov (dir.), Histoire partagée, mémoires divisées. Ukraine, Russie, Pologne. Lausanne : Editions Antipodes, 2021. P. 195-208.
- Russland und der Tag des Sieges“. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9.5.2020.
- « Le 9 mai, Jour de la Victoire. Transformations d’une fête soviétique ». Politika.io. 9.5.2020.
- Victory Day: The biography of a Soviet holiday. Eurozine. 8.5.2020.
- „Gedenktage und Militärparaden in Russland zum 75. Jubiläum des Kriegsendes: der 9. Mai und der 3. September von 1945 bis 2020“. Erinnerungskulturen. 6.5.2020.
- День Победы: прошлое // Кольта. 6.5.2020.
- „Diesseits der Kremlmauern. Für einen anderen Blick auf die russländische Gesellschaft.“ Mittelweg 36. April/Mai 2017, S. 63-73.
- Памятник и праздник: этнография 9 мая // Неприкосновенный запас. 2015. №101. С. 93-111.
Video and Audio