This article examines the emergence of what I call “spectral performance” in Putin's Russia. Focusing on the Immortal Regiment initiative, I investigate the growing importance of practices that ask the living to act as surrogates for the dead. My analysis proceeds in three stages. First, applying a memory studies frame, I show how the Regiment helps preserve memory of WWII in a time of significant generational change. Second, drawing on theories of political theology and biopolitics, I show how the Regiment reaffirms the Kremlin's sovereign power to regulate the boundaries between life and death while symbolically displacing sovereignty from the “flesh” of the people to a growing ranks of “immortals.” Finally, focusing on the question of representation, I show how the Regiment helps construct an oppressive distribution of the sensible that privileges the dead over the living. I conclude by examining St. Petersburg artist Maksim Evstropov's necro-activist project Party of the Dead as a cultural critique of the Regiment.

The paper investigates past and current research on the executions at Kurapaty, in the northern suburbs of Minsk, Belarus, in 1937–41, covering the period from the discovery of mass graves in the 1970s to the establishment of an official monument in late 2018. It deals with several issues: archaeological excavations of the site in the 1980s and 1990s; the numbers, ethnic origin, and identities of the victims; the continuing debates between the authorities, scholars, and the nationalist opposition; the protection of the site from various incursions; and the role of Kurapaty as an alternative national symbol to the Great Patriotic War victory. It also looks at Kurapaty victims in the context of the Stalin Purges in the USSR as a whole. The authors conclude that while the number of deaths and the scale of repressions did not differ significantly from the Soviet average, the impact on the modern state has been largely concealed because of the politicization of the event, and the tardiness and unwillingness of the post-independence government to peruse the harsher aspects of the Stalin era.

What is the number of casualties from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster? Historian Kate Brown's important book grew out of apparent frustration with the controversy surrounding the accident. Brown was frustrated with the position of United Nations agencies—often repeated in the media—that only thirty-one to fifty-four died as the result of the accident, most of them emergency responders. The only recognized effect for the general population was an increase in nonfatal thyroid cancer in children. She was also frustrated with the assertions that we might never know the actual death toll.

This article examines the takeover of the Perm’-36 Gulag museum as emblematic of the dynamics of patriotic legitimation in Russia. The museum was dedicated to preserving the memory of the victims of Soviet political repression and it grew in popularity into the 2000s, emerging as an opposition platform and target for self-styled patriots who accused it of distorting Soviet history. The regional government soon joined the battle, finally forcing the museum's takeover and transforming it into a site honoring the Gulag rather than its victims. Drawing on interviews conducted with the museum's former director and scientific directors in 2015 and extensive local press materials, this analysis of the struggle over Perm’-36 demonstrates the significance of patriotism in sustaining the regional government's attacks even in the absence of federal patronage. The findings thus challenge prevailing understandings of authoritarian regime politics as driven primarily by patronage and power-maximizing elites.

In the thirty years since the Chernobyl disaster we have learned a great deal about the causes of the accident, the human side of the story of those who worked at the station, the operators and their families in the now-abandoned nearby town of Pripyat, the hundreds of thousands of “liquidators,” and the millions of individuals affected by fallout, including some 300,000 who were evacuated from various exclusion zones and heavily affected rural areas, mostly to the north and east in (Soviet) Belarus, Ukraine, and small parts of Russia. What are the long term consequences of radioactive fallout to land and living things? How many people have and will die from exposure to radioactivity? In Manual for Survival, Kate Brown documents the efforts of scientists and doctors in Belarus and Ukraine to understand the short- and long-term impact of radiation exposure on Soviet and post-Soviet citizens, and the challenges even to simple data collection. Her conclusions stand in stark contrast to those of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations (UN) Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation that estimated perhaps 5,000 total deaths. The numbers will be much higher, perhaps on the order of 10,000 or 50,000 excess cancers and premature deaths. But we shall never know with certainty owing to a variety of factors—including the challenges of conducting research in the former Soviet Union, the obfuscation of data in some quarters who appear to seek to minimize the impact, and scientific uncertainty itself.

I woke one day the spring of 2019 to a jammed inbox and the realization that I had become a character in my own history. I have not shied away from writing in the first person, but publishing Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future involved a heightened level of exposure that left me for a time wishing I could sink down under the earth's crust, the book with it.

I met Natalia Baranovska, a Ukrainian historian who is one of the characters in Kate Brown's book, last summer. I also read her work on the Chernobyl (in Ukrainian, Chornobyl) nuclear disaster, but I did not know her personal and academic story until I read the Manual for Survival. Baranovska began to study the Chernobyl catastrophe before any of her fellow historians in Kyiv considered it a legitimate topic for historical research. She made dozens, if not hundreds, of visits to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of documents on the disaster that she brought from the area. Natalia Baranovska is also a cancer survivor.

This article argues that a focus on Ukraine challenges the general understanding of culture in the revolutionary period, which either focuses on artists working in Moscow making Soviet art, or on non-Russian (Ukrainian, Jewish or Polish) artists in the regions making “national” art. Neither paradigm captures the radical shift in infrastructure during the imperial collapse and civil war. Placing the regions at the center of analysis highlights how Kyiv was an important cultural center during the period for later artistic developments in Europe and in the USSR. It shows that revolutionary culture is fundamentally wartime culture. Finally, the article argues that peripheral visions are central to a full geography of culture in order to trace how cultural infrastructures collapse and are re-constituted.