No country has ever lost as many people in a war as the Soviet Union did during World War II, and a wide range of war commemorations took on corresponding importance after 1945. Many of the survivors felt a genuine need for ways to remember, make sense of, and mourn the many deaths — and also to express pride in the victory that finally came. At the same time, commemorating the war in the Soviet Union was also always a means of maintaining political control domestically and projecting a favourable self-image abroad.
Mischa Gabowitsch is a historian and sociologist and the current Professor of Multilingual and Transnational Post-Soviet Studies at the University of Mainz (JGU) in Germany.
In the Soviet Union, monuments and commemorative events were dedicated not to World War II as a whole, but rather to the Great Patriotic War, which was seen as beginning on 22 June 1941, the day Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Starting in 1945, 9 May was regarded as Victory Day. Initially, 3 September was also celebrated around the USSR as Victory over Japan Day, alongside 9 May.
Commemorating the War in the Soviet Union Was Never a Strictly Russian Affair
The Germans and their allies caused terrible suffering in Russia: well over 1 million people died during the siege of Leningrad alone. However, they ravaged the western parts of the USSR for an even longer period of time, causing more severe destruction: unlike Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova were completely occupied. The largest individual killing operations of the Holocaust took place in Ukraine, and even the non-Jewish civilian population suffered horrendous casualties, to say nothing of the countless dead Red Army soldiers.
After 1945, commemorating the war in Soviet Ukraine thus acquired deep significance. On one hand, in the formerly occupied territories, there was no escaping those historical experiences: their traces were much more immediately present than in, for example, Siberia or Central Asia. On the other hand, Soviet leaders were careful to stick closely to the official narrative of the war, which only allowed space for heroism and liberation.
In reality, people in Ukraine had experienced the occupation in very different ways, and the country’s western regions, which the Soviets claimed in 1939, were only Sovietized after the war with the use of tremendous violence against the long-standing armed resistance of Ukrainian nationalists. Commemorating the war there was not least of all a means of state-led indoctrination and discipline.
After 1947, 9 May initially lost its status as a non-working holiday, however it was still observed as a day of remembrance — including in Russia and the other Soviet republics. The subject of war never disappeared from film or literature either, and memorials were erected in many parts of the country, only sometimes on instructions from Moscow or the capitals of the republics. They were often initiated by particular army units, local party committees, architects, or even individual family members of the dead.
In Ukraine, as in the other formerly occupied parts of the Soviet Union, all these forms of commemoration played an especially important role. Subsequent to the war, individual cities would mark the exact day of their own particular liberation. There were especially large numbers of dead in Ukraine, who needed to be either buried or reburied, and grief was acutely present. Additionally, commemoration was often religious in form, because despite decades of atheist policy, a large segment of the population still adhered to traditional religious practices, and not only in rural areas.
To counter that, the Communist Party deliberately developed new socialist rituals of commemoration intended to replace the traditional customs. This effort was particularly vigorous in Ukraine, so it came as no surprise when a reaffirmation of Victory Day and, more generally, of official Soviet commemoration of the war emerged from the Ukrainian republic. In January 1965, Ukrainian party leader Petro Shelest wrote to the new party leadership in Moscow that “new rituals and customs to immortalize the brave deeds of the people are arising and spreading ever more widely”. He proposed the re-establishment of a country-wide non-working holiday on 9 May as a way to provide space for these practices, such as tending to mass graves or veterans’ reunions at monuments.
After 1965, an outright cult of the Great Patriotic War developed in the Soviet Union.
Apart from Shelest’s proposal, there were many other reasons for the growing importance of war commemorations in the Soviet Union starting in the mid-1960s. The new foreign policy context was shaped by the war in Vietnam, the new rivalry with China, and the West German debate over the application of the statute of limitations on Nazi crimes. For the Soviet leadership, memory of the country’s greatest military triumph and the sacrifice it required was a trump card in all these conflicts. Domestically, the war’s veterans had by then taken up important social positions and were eager for recognition and benefits. Moreover, memory of the war was much more present than memory of the October Revolution, which by that point lay a half century in the past, and it therefore became an important source of legitimacy for the Soviet system.
After 1965, an outright cult of the Great Patriotic War developed in the Soviet Union. In the process, many commemorative practices that had developed in Ukraine and other western parts of the country were adopted and standardized nationwide. Thousands of war memorials were erected, even in the most remote corners of the country and in many new urban residential districts. Many of the simple memorials from the first two post-war decades were replaced with increasingly monumental memorial complexes, including the “Mother Motherland” statues in Volgograd (1967), formerly Stalingrad, and Kyiv (1981), which still top the list of tallest statues in Europe today. In the late 1980s, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic alone was home to 40,000 memorials to the Great Patriotic War, but even in other republics there was hardly a village without one.
By the mid-1980s, however, many people in the Soviet Union had grown weary of the war cult. The regular gatherings with former frontline soldiers had became a burdensome and repetitive obligation for many schoolchildren. The ignoble treatment of ageing veterans in retirement homes and hospitals contrasted with the often pompous memorial events. Voluntary search parties continually made new discoveries of unburied remains in forests and swamps, exposing the official lie that “nothing and no one” had been forgotten. Finally, under the perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (transparency) policies, a debate flared up over the Molotov−Ribbentrop Pact, the crimes of the Soviet system and its army, and the “cost of victory” — the millions of Red Army soldiers who, in the eyes of many, had been needlessly turned into cannon fodder by an inhumane military strategy. The war cult had reached a low point, at least in its triumphal aspects.
Post-Soviet Russia
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, memorials to the Great Patriotic War took on new importance in Russia in 1995. In a country that was extremely politically divided, President Boris Yeltsin was looking for a unifying “national idea”. Despite the debates over the cost of victory, memory of the war was the only thing that was up to the task. On the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, there was a military parade in Moscow on 9 May, which only then became an annual event: in the Soviet Union, parades like these had only taken place on special, usually round anniversaries.
This memorial culture has become increasingly important under Vladimir Putin as part of a new ideology of national pride, and it has again been used more and more frequently as a tool of foreign policy: Russia has increasingly adopted a role as protector of Soviet war memorials abroad, condemned the new national historical narratives in some former Soviet republics as revisionist, and conducted itself as the protector of people abroad who have honoured the victory of the Red Army and felt marginalized for doing so — even where their initial motivation had nothing to do with supporting Russian policies. The official discourse has increasingly focused on the victory over Nazi Germany as a world-historical achievement, rather than on the war in general and its victims. Increasingly, 9 May has become the most important national holiday, something it had never been in the Soviet Union.
If commemoration of the war has now been reinvigorated in Russia, however, that has by no means been due to state policy alone. One important factor has been the interest of the grandchildren’s generation in family history. As is the case everywhere, the grandchildren of the wartime generation have been more inclined to romanticize the biographies and accomplishments of their grandparents than were the immediate offspring of that generation. Above all, they have built new war memorials and modified old ones, as also happened in many other post-Soviet states: portraits of individual war victims were subsequently attached to mass graves and memorials were expanded to include, for instance, religious symbols. Because war memorials from the Soviet era were regarded as sacred commemoration sites, new memorials for those who died in other events were erected alongside them and had to fight for their place in the collective memory — those who perished in Afghanistan or Chechnya, for instance, or the victims of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl.
New practices expanded the repertoire of Soviet war commemoration. The best known of these are the ribbon of St. George and the ‘Immortal Regiment’.
Other factors also contributed to the war memorials’ new role. On the one hand, there was the new freedom to travel: it was now much easier than during the Soviet era to leave one’s own country and visit the burial sites of fallen relatives or even large Soviet memorials in other countries. In particular, the memorial that was erected in Berlin’s Treptower Park in 1949, whose silhouette was recognizable to every child in the Soviet Union, became a genuine pilgrimage site. On the other hand, a great deal of new information became available, stimulating additional commemorative activity. In particular, in 2007, Russia’s Ministry of Defence made available an online database containing millions of archival files on Soviet participants in the war.
Given these kinds of encouragement, new practices have emerged little by little and expanded the repertoire of Soviet war commemoration considerably. The best known of these are the ribbon of St. George and the “Immortal Regiment”.
The black and orange ribbon of St. George came about in 2005 at the suggestion of a journalist for a state-run media agency as a personalized symbol commemorating the Great Patriotic War. Inspired by the British poppy in remembrance of World War I and based on the colours of the ribbon of the Order of Saint George, a tsarist-era military decoration, it was initially meant to be sold in exchange for donations to veterans. That idea failed. Instead, it developed into a universal symbol of identification with the Soviet victory over Germany in World War II with the capacity to lend a patriotic veneer to any possible initiative (including commercial ones), particularly around 9 May.
The commemorative initiative “Immortal Regiment” was started in 2012 by a group of liberal journalists in Tomsk. Dissatisfied with the state-centred commemorations during the parade on Red Square, they proposed marching through urban centres with portraits of individual veterans as a way of bringing memory culture closer to common people, making it more democratic, and emphasizing the entire society’s contribution to the war effort. The initiative spread like wildfire, and two years later there were “Immortal Regiment” marches in dozens of places in Russia and abroad with several million participants in all.
However, it is precisely because they were so popular that both initiatives were very quickly co-opted by the Russian state. The ribbon of St. George became — specifically in the context of the invasion of Ukraine starting in 2014 — a symbol of support for Russia’s policies and its geopolitical ambitions. Despite significant resistance, the “Immortal Regiment” was transformed from a horizontal, non-partisan initiative into a state-organized movement. In the tension between mournful and triumphant commemoration — between “Never again” and “We can do it again” — the centre of gravity has shifted more and more toward the militaristic pole. The work of constructing memorials has also been centralized — even more intensively than during the Soviet era — under the aegis of the state-owned Russian Military Historical Society.
Post-Soviet Ukraine
Post-Soviet Ukraine has often been portrayed as a divided country in which the eastern regions have uncritically adopted the Soviet narrative of victory over fascism in the Great Patriotic War and, by contrast, a new cult around nationalist leader Stepan Bandera (1909−1959) and the largely fascist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) developed in the west. In reality, this idea has always been a drastic oversimplification.
Western Ukraine — the part of the country that was only incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic after World War II — also was and still is home to numerous Soviet memorials to those who died in the war. In the east and the south, conversely, there are also monuments to Bandera and the UPA, who, in retrospect, are often ahistorically perceived as unproblematic freedom fighters. Turf battles between both positions became particularly noticeable in the major cities and were fuelled for a long time by politicians of various camps who framed the different memorial traditions as important components of particular regional identities. In rural areas, the culture of remembrance is usually more pragmatic and conciliatory. It often happens that more recent memorials to UPA fighters stand next to those from the Soviet era commemorating civilian victims — and the same people lay flowers at both in order to unite villagers from different camps in death.
The years ‘1941−1945’, indicating the Great Patriotic War, were replaced with ‘1939−1945’, or the entire duration of World War II.
Moreover, these two poles do not represent the full range of World War II memory. In a heterogeneous country, many regions, ethnic minorities — including Crimean Tatars, Roma, and Hungarians — and even professional groups have their own cultures of remembrance relating to the war.
During its 2014 military intervention in Ukraine, Russia did not hesitate to invoke the memory of World War II and the danger that the new government in Kyiv allegedly posed to the legacy of that victory. From a Ukrainian perspective, that turned Russia’s version of war remembrance into a justification for military aggression. In response, Kyiv sought to de-Sovietize commemorations of the war. The years “1941−1945”, indicating the Great Patriotic War, were replaced with “1939−1945”, or the entire duration of World War II, including on monuments. The poppy, based on a British model (more directly than was the case with Russia’s ribbon of St. George), was introduced as a symbol of mourning, rather than triumph, in memory of the victims, and 8 May was declared the new official Day of Remembrance, although 9 May admittedly coexisted with it until 2023 and has continued to be observed as Victory Day by many in the country.
Nonetheless, the Soviet war memorials in Ukraine were largely left undisturbed. In the course of the Euromaidan protests in 2013−14, memorials did start to be demolished — initially by activists on their own initiative — in what was known as “Leninfall”. Laws and resolutions on “de-Communizing” the country were passed in the years that followed, leading to the removal of numerous statues of Communist leaders and symbols of the Soviet state from public space as well as changes to street and place names.
However, Soviet war memorials were not touched — with a few exceptions. Most of the memorials also function as gravestones, and in Ukraine many of them have grown into complex memorial sites where the dead of the Soviet−Afghan War, the Chernobyl disaster, the Holocaust, and the Holodomor — the manufactured famine of 1932−33 — are also commemorated.
As a result, Soviet war memorials, particularly in the smaller cities and in the country, remained fixed components of social life. This is visible not least of all in the fact that the people who live there modify them in a variety of ways to express their appreciation and make them their own. The local population therefore often replaces Soviet symbols with religious ones or emblems of the Ukrainian state. Mass graves are supplemented with portraits of individual soldiers who died, and memorials are renovated on the initiative of local people.
Alongside these forms of popular adoption, which are similar to what happens in other post-Soviet countries like Russia or Moldova, a tradition has arisen in Ukraine over the past 10 to 15 years of highlighting individual elements of monuments with brightly coloured paint. All these practices testify to the fact that war memorials have by now come to be treated similarly to the graves of family members.
The Russo−Ukrainian War and Renewed Demolition of Memorials
In its large-scale assault on Ukraine in 2022, Russia once again invoked the memory of the Great Patriotic War and “victory over fascism”, albeit mixed with other motives as well, such as a narrative of re-establishing Russia’s imperial greatness and symbols of Christian holy war. Thus, while the legacy of the victory was just one rationale among many, the official justifications for the invasion also included a claim that Soviet war memorials in Ukraine were being systematically destroyed.
Evidently, many Russian soldiers sincerely believed that — and had to come up with creative solutions when they found countless well-preserved memorials on-site. The many propaganda photos and videos that were produced for Russian audiences often presented practices that had evolved in Ukraine, such as colourfully painting memorials, as Russian inventions or showed eternal flames that were “rekindled” at memorials — even in places where no such flame had ever burned, including during the Soviet era. Particularly in the first year of the large-scale invasion, Russia pursued an active memorial policy in the newly occupied areas in other ways as well: memorials with Ukrainian symbols — often on pedestals once used for Lenin statues — were destroyed almost without exception and sometimes replaced with figures such as Soviet secret service operatives or the thirteenth century prince Alexander Nevsky.
The demolition of memorials in Ukraine has increasingly impacted Soviet war memorials as well.
What happened in response to Russia’s aggression and its appropriation of the memory of the Great Patriotic War was precisely what was officially supposed to be prevented: the demolition of memorials in Ukraine has increasingly impacted Soviet war memorials as well, albeit on a far smaller scale than is often portrayed. In Lviv Oblast, activists joined forces with the regional government to have almost every Soviet-era war memorial removed, as had already happened by governmental decree in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland (but not in other countries). In the western Ukrainian oblasts of Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil, there were attempts to comprehensively demolish memorials.
In every other oblast, while some individual memorials were removed by decree of the local authorities, and activists sometimes took the law into their own hands and destroyed war memorials with Soviet symbols, the vast majority of war memorials were left standing. Even in western Ukraine, there was significant resistance to removing them, given that many local people compared defending the country against the German occupiers with its defence against the Russian invaders. In many places, portraits and names of soldiers who died in the current war have also been added to the old memorials — sometimes to protect them. Only memorials for Soviet military leaders had to go, including those that were erected after Ukrainian independence: similar to the many memorials for cultural and political figures from Russia, they were now regarded as symbols of Russian imperial domination and, moreover, held responsible for the senseless sacrifice of millions of Ukrainian Red Army soldiers during World War II.
In Ukrainian society, attitudes toward the future of Soviet war memorials vary widely. In surveys and focus group discussions, a great many people express support for maintaining all memorials — at least when they honour common soldiers. A similarly large group supports selective preservation, but there is also a loud minority pleading for the complete removal of all Soviet-era war memorials from public space and, at most, keeping them in museums.
Conclusion
The future of remembrance of World War II in the post-Soviet world remains uncertain. Russia’s attempts to lay claim to the only correct way to honour the memory of the war will have little success because corresponding memorials and commemorative rituals also play an important — locally distinct — social role in Ukraine and several other successor states to the Soviet Union. At the same time, there is no ignoring the fact that commemoration practices have irreconcilably drifted apart, particularly as regards Russia and Ukraine, and are increasingly overshadowed, especially in Ukraine, by the enormous suffering caused by the new war that Russia has started. The outcome of that war will determine what role World War II will play in the collective memory of both countries beyond the eightieth anniversary of its end.
Translated by Joseph Keady and Marc Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective.