Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine (Memory, Heritage and Public History in Central and Eastern Europe)

From the very first weeks of Russia’s large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, Russian soldiers, politicians, and proxy administrators expended considerable effort interacting with monuments on newly occupied territory. Why did the invaders care enough about war memorials to divert scarce resources to destroying, maintaining, or building them amid a massive war? Why did they remove some memorials and spare others? What was the point of commemorating past victories and defeats while bombing Ukrainian cities, and how did commemorative ceremonies in the occupied territories

change over the first year of the war? What was the broader impact of monument-related practices beyond the local settings in which they occurred? And what does the Ukrainian case teach us more generally about how memorials to past wars can be used to justify new conquests? These are some of the questions this book explores, based on fieldwork in occupied Ukraine and online research.

Mykola Homanyuk, sociologist, geographer, and theatermaker, is an associate professor at Kherson State University, Ukraine. He defended his PhD thesis in sociology at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Since 2022 he has been a member of the Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, and Memory research group. Mykola is the author of numerous articles on mental mapping, ethnic studies, as well as memory and commemoration. As a theatermaker he runs the Kherson Theater Lab.

Mischa Gabowitsch, historian and sociologist, is Professor of Multilingual and Transnational Post-Soviet Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford and the EHESS in Paris, and previously held positions in Princeton, Potsdam, and Vienna. He is the author or editor of numerous books in various languages, including Protest in Putin’s Russia (2016) and Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities (2017).