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War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine

Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk, Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine, Central European University Press, 2025. Open Access.

By Denys Shatalov

The monuments we encounter in a territory tell us not so much about its past as about present ideology. The new study by Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk, “Monuments and Territory. War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine” explores the fate of war memorials in the Russian-occupied territories during the first year of the ongoing full-scale war.

The authors focus on war memorials honouring different eras and conflicts, from the medieval battle of Kalka to the Soviet War in Afghanistan and the Anti-Terrorist Operation in Eastern Ukraine (20142022), erected in Soviet times or during Ukrainian independence. However, the book’s analysis demonstrates that the attitude of Russian occupation authorities towards those monuments considered in the text as “war memorials” (although I don’t find a clear definition or list of the precise monuments taken into consideration in the book) differed, depending on the perceived level of their ‘Ukrainianess’ (what the occupants also treat as nationalist ideology).

The first chapter of the monograph is devoted to the authors’ theoretical framework. The book presents a collective portrait of war monuments, studying them as a comprehensive phenomenon entailing their materiality, ideology, and representations. I sympathize with the authors’ approach of looking at the monuments (the authors argue that in the post-Soviet context, no strict distinction between understanding certain objects as ‘memorials’ or ‘monuments’ can be provided) not in isolation, but as a monumentscape, “in their relationship with other monuments and, more broadly, with their wider material and social context – their place in a landscape” (р. 1617). Carried out in the midst of a year of full-scale war, the study shows how several phenomena, like iconoclasm, vernacular practices of handling monuments, propaganda, and rituals, intersect on them and how the process looks on both sides of the front line of the ongoing war. It is also important that among sources, the authors rely not only on analyses of media and social media reports but also on their field observations. Significant here is the experience of Mykola Homanyuk, who was engaged in fieldwork in the occupied Kherson region in 2022. This is a truly unique experience among scholars dealing with the issue, the obtaining of which exposed him to constant risk.

In Chapter 2, the authors give an overview of the Ukrainian vernacular tradition of engaging with war monuments. While this chapter primarily aims at giving background knowledge to the reader about the conditions faced by occupants, I find it very important. The authors show how local communities have repaired, repainted, and modified their war monuments over the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, transforming them in this way. It fills a gap, as the topic of transformations of local war monuments in Ukraine in the last 3050 years is almost overlooked in scholarship, since most authors worked with general discussions around monuments and certain cases of the most prominent objects of such kind, but not with a grassroots perspective.

Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the Russians’ destruction of those monuments in the occupied territories they interpreted as Ukrainian and with the restoration, modification, or planning to build new monuments. A particularly interesting angle, in my opinion, is the plot of the Russians’ collision with reality. First, their propaganda in both major and local media agencies had self-convinced them of the miserable state of the Second World War (or the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in Soviet and Russian tradition) monuments in Ukraine and in the prohibition of WWII commemorations there. Then occupants faced the reality of the good condition of the monuments, so they would manage to hide reality or present the situation in a distorted manner in accordance with their propaganda discourse. The book shows that the situation with the WWII monuments from the Russian perspective fits into their quasi-religious attitude to the GPW cult. The monuments appear to be sacred relics that need to be liberated from the hands of infidels and re-consecrated.  

Gabowitsch and Homanyuk also document how occupants dismantle or transform Ukrainian monuments. They show that the first monuments unacceptable to the occupiers were those dedicated to the victims of the ATO and the Maidan. However, others, such as the monument to the Cossack leader Sagaidachny, were also at risk of being dismantled. Dismantling of monuments or symbols on them could also take place in several stages, which “reflects the shifts in Russian plans for the conquered territories” (p. 79). At the same time, the authors demonstrated the inconsistency of the occupiers’ actions, concluding that “not all memorials displaying Ukrainian symbols were targeted” (p. 82).

The book is not only about the monuments themselves but also about their exploitation. Here, especially from the Ukrainian studies perspective, the approach in Chapter 5 is innovative. It presents the study of monuments’ usage as a background in media stories. This issue is important for understanding the political significance of monuments and their use as symbols in this ongoing war.

Chapter 6 deals with Ukrainian activists’ or local communities’ dismantling of monuments in the unoccupied territory, which have been perceived as Russian or Soviet symbols since February 2022. This part also analyses the creation of new Ukrainian war memorials on territories that were de-occupied in 2022. Considering the authors’ presentation of the situation on both sides of the frontline,, one could speak of a kind of indirect “dialogue“ between the Russian actions and the reaction of Ukrainians towards monuments in controlled areas.

Chapter 7 describes Russian commemorative actions at the occupied territories, concentrated near war monuments. It presents the commemorative calendar implemented by occupants and analyses their practices, including the usage of symbols.

The approach of examining the ‘collective biography’ of war monuments taken in the book provokes the question, ‘What phenomenom is a monument ’? The authors cite Robert Musil’s remark of the monument’s invisibility as its main feature. This research demonstrates instead how war puts monuments in the spotlight, turning them into well-visible ideological signs on the terrain. Also, readers can see that monuments become important not in themselves, not as “sites of memory” embodied in an object on the ground, but as an action. The restoration of Lenin monuments was made seemingly not in memory of Lenin himself and not because of the crucial importance of this figure to the occupants. It was rather an act of a symbolic rejection of the Ukrainian policy of decommunisation, launched in 2015. These actions are in line with the dismantling of the memorials to the Heavenly Hundred, protesters killed in 2014, – it is the rejection of the Maidan, which resulted in the Leninfall, and toppled the pro-Russian president as well. At the same time, Russians’ “defense” of the WWII monuments, with special emphasis on them, eventually strengthened the perception of them as Russian symbols in unoccupied Ukraine and clearly contributed to the wave of their dismantling. In other words, the situation turned out to be the opposite of the goal declared by the Russians.

This book, documenting the fate of war memorials during the year of full-scale war in Ukraine and presenting descriptions and analyses of different practices, thus provides the reader with both rich factual material and an excellent opportunity for reflection on the phenomenon of monuments and their functions, memory, and memorial politics in general. It is undoubtedly an important contribution to the research of monumental culture and the politics of memory of both the contemporary Russian regime and the Ukrainian government.


About the Author

Denys Shatalov earned his Ph.D. in History in 2016 from Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, Ukraine, with a thesis on Ukrainian Cossacks in public discourse from the second half of the 18th to the first half of the 19th century. From 2015 onwards, he has been a research fellow at the “Tkuma” Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies and the Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine Museum (2015–2020). He has been a Prisma Ukraïna visiting fellow in 2019/20 and a 2022/23 non-resident Prisma Ukraïna Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. He is a member of the War, Migration, Memory research group since 2022. Since October 2023, he is a Sustaining Ukrainian Scholarship Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies Sofia and a 2024–25 Prisma Ukraïna fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation.


Citation: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine – Book review by Denys Shatalov, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 11.02.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/54848

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (February 11, 2025). War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved March 25, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13amm


Forum Transregionale Studien

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. More...

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