Authors

Discussion

Even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 2022, the resurgence of “military-patriotic” organizations and institutions was widespread across Russia, contributing to a creeping militarization of society inextricably tied to the Great Patriotic War. This paper conceptualizes war commemoration as an assemblage of a range of carnivalesque practices and discourses together with a significant decentralized, grass-roots component. Commemoration eventually becomes a nation-building exercise - much more performative rather than actual commemoration. Given the ubiquity and all-encompassing nature of GPW celebrations, with their inevitable side effect of militarization of Russian society, this paper discusses how the GPW collective memory has become stripped of its traumatic component and has become a vector for geopolitical ambition. I then investigate in more detail how militarization functions within different age groups in the Russian society, be it through “toddler armies”, computer games, or military-themed entertainment parks.