This paper investigates the practices and politics of memorialisation of Russian war casualties since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Drawing on Russian and Soviet legacies of the memorial image, exemplified by practices such as the procession of the Immortal Legion (bessmertnij pol’k) and mogily banditov (that is, the headstones of gangsters, particularly from the 1990s-2000s), I look at the ways in which the Russian state has used its war dead for propagandistic and social engineering purposes over the last two years, and examine the significance of the necroimage in relation to the Russian state’s practices of mythmaking and self-justification. From my findings, I propose a new way of viewing the Putinist regime's self-image: as a death-mask, constructed around a metamodern articulation of Russian temporality.
