Book Discussion: Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine, by Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

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 explored in Mischa Gabowitsch's and Mykola Homanyuk's new book, based on fieldwork in occupied Ukraine and online research. In this session, some of the most knowledgeable experts in the field of Ukrainian memory studies will discuss the book in conversation with the authors.

Sub Unit

• History: Since 1990

Chair

• Margaret Comer, U College London (UK)

Roundtable Members

• Mischa Gabowitsch, U of Mainz (Germany)

• Mykola Homanyuk, Kherson State University (Ukraine)

• Viktoriya Sereda, Institute of Ethnology, NASU (Ukraine)

• Denys Shatalov, Centre for Advanced Studies Sofia (Bulgaria)

Session Manager

• Aliide Naylor, Independent Scholar