In May 2005, I spent several days observing the annual celebrations of May 9, Victory Day, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Sixty years before, the German leadership had surrendered to the Allied Forces, ending bloodshed, destruction, and genocide on the European continent, although of course violence would last for months, even years, where deportations, forced migrations, or guerilla combat continued to threaten the lives and livelihood of hundreds of thousands. For me, the most memorable sight of that day was the oranges and half slices of bread that had been carefully placed on the stones marking the mass graves on Piskarevskoe Memorial Cemetery. Displaying only numbers—1941, 1942, or 1943—the concrete slabs identify the year in which the thousands of victims buried in each mound had died, succumbing to starvation, disease, exhaustion, or cold during the Siege of Leningrad. Contrasting the innumerable flags, military music, and celebration of heroism in the rest of the city, the cemetery was not only a site of grief and focus on civilian death; it was also a place of folk memory that had survived decades of fluctuating politics of memory. The coexistence of state-sponsored bombast and individualized forms of remembrance that point to how easy it would have been to save people's lives were marking the (post-) Soviet memory of World War II in simultaneously banal and puzzling ways.
Fast forward to May 9, 2013. Eighteen scholars of various disciplines attend the celebrations of Victory Day in cities and towns within and beyond the former Soviet Union, in Sortavala (Karelia), Minsk (Belarus), Vienna (Austria), Grozny (Chechnya), Sofia (Bulgaria), among others. Their observations, including photographs and excerpts from interviews with local residents and participants, resulted in sixteen impressive essays, several of them written collaboratively, that are collected in Monument and Celebration: Ethnographies of Victory Day. This unique approach distinguishes the volume from many other books on memory and commemoration. Where the reader most often finds a series of analyses on various themes that have little in common, conclusions usually remain limited to individual subjects. Here, based on observations of the “same” event in different places at the “same” time offers a collage of memorial practices that have much in common across geographical, political, and even generational divides, and show the strength and resilience of local, individual, and folk practices of commemoration and contemplation.
Guided by questions about the role of Soviet monuments, the way in which political conflicts over May 9 shape public space, new traditions that have been established since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the role of the anniversary itself for local community cohesion, the chapters provide rich, sometimes thick descriptions of a day that is cause for both celebration and reflection in almost every European country.
After Mischa Gabowitsch's extraordinarily well-written and sophisticated introduction that develops a rich theoretical framework to consider memory practices in formerly Soviet countries and beyond, the volume's chapters offer unique perspectives on commemorative practices that emerge in unexpected places and in complicated ways: Russian immigrants or tourists give the events of the day in Vienna or Berlin a distinct twist that challenges locally held truisms; celebrations in Grozny turn into an homage to the ruling powers and Russian geopolitics while stigmatizing the commemoration of the deportation of Chechens during WWII and reproducing anti-Caucasian resentments.
Olga Davydova-Menge's chapter on Karelian Sortavala emphasizes what is true for many other localities: May 9 festivities acquire a distinctly local flavor, with organizers and participants making use of local resources from year to year. The resulting “home-spun” (domotkany) celebrations serve to create community cohesion and belonging, with the day's rituals such as wreath-laying as one of the very few, if not only remaining collective acts after the Soviet Union's break-up. At the same time, these particularized celebrations produce a tension between locally favored interpretations and national frames of interpretation. In Sortavala, for instance, the memory of the Winter War with Finland foregrounds the displacement of Finnish residents in the past with the recent rapprochement with Finnish neighbors, which is in sharp contrast to the state-supported narrative of the war.
A detailed analysis of the history of the first Eternal Flame in the USSR is exemplary for many other studies of memory. Anna Iudkina is unable to establish a firm date for the origin of what is now a staple of war commemoration in the area and uses this “failure” to identify new questions for further inquiry: How is the memory of events passed on? What does this memory mean for writing local history? Which archives document what, and why? (150)
One minor flaw of the volume is the uneven length of chapters, with texts ranging from thirteen to thirty-six pages. Some analyses could have used some tightening, while others appear incomplete and rushed. Yet, the greatest pity of the book is its delayed publication. With many chapters completed at least seven years before it found their way to readers, the volume comes later than several publications with in-depth analyses of the 2015 celebrations of the 70th anniversary of Victory Day, including a volume edited by Mischa Gabowitsch himself. Certainly not a fault of the contributors, the delay makes several of the chapters seem outdated. Most glaring is the discrepancy in the case of Aleksei Lastovskii's rich analysis of Minsk and its distinct commemorative architecture, where the recent crackdown on a wide-ranging protest and opposition movement has led to a drastic repoliticization and redesign of the state memorial practices and politics. One therefore hopes that this well-designed and thought-out book will be read as a historical document and serve further, comparative studies of commemorative practices and how they change over time.
