Kathleen Smith1; 1 Georgetown University, United States
Discussion
The liquidation in December 2021 of the “Memorial Society,” a group dedicated to researching and commemorating the state-sponsored repressions that stretched throughout Soviet history seemed to signal a decisive end to public remembrances of tragic aspects of national history in Russia. After all, the Prosecutor accused the group of distorting history with the obvious end of serving foreign interests by falsely depicting the USSR as a terrorist state. Yet the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repressions remains on the calendar of state holidays and Moscow is host not only to an official museum of the gulag, but also to a federally funded monument to victims inaugurated by President Putin in 2017. My paper will analyze a range of conformist and subversive interactions with commemorative culture—including decorating or destroying physical markers--in the aftermath of Memorial’s dissolution and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
