Details

At: 06/02/2025 4:00pm, in cooperation with:

Speakers:

Mischa Gabowitsch,
Mykola Homanyuk

Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine, moderated by: Violeta Davoliūtė

From the very first weeks of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian soldiers, politicians, and proxy administrators expended considerable effort interacting with monuments on newly occupied territory. They paid particular attention to war memorials, whether dating from Soviet times or built in independent Ukraine: memorials commemorating the dead of the Second World War first and foremost, but also those dedicated to a range of other military conflicts throughout the ages.

Why did the Russian 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, richly illustrated book Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine (Budapest; New York: CEU Press, 2025). The book is based on a detailed study of the treatment of war memorials in Russian-occupied Ukraine during the first year after February 2022. Living in occupied Kherson, Mykola conducted fieldwork on monument policies at great personal risk. In addition, the book draws on a systematic database of sources on interaction with war memorials in every Ukrainian district occupied by Russia following the 2022 attack.

In this dMSA event, the authors, in conversation with Violeta Davoliūtė, will talk about their book and how they wrote it. They will also reflect on the most recent developments surrounding Soviet war memorials in Ukraine and other European countries.

Presenters

Mischa Gabowitsch, historian and sociologist, is Professor of Multilingual and Transnational Post-Soviet Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He holds a BA and MA from the University of Oxford and a DEA and PhD from the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, and previously held positions at the Universities of Princeton and Vienna as well as the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and thematic journal issues in various languages on protest and social movements as well as memory and commemoration. These include, in English, The Russian Field: Views from Abroad (2011), Protest in Putin’s Russia (2016), Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities (2017), The Sociology of Belarusian Protest (2021), Beyond Representation: The Visual Analysis of History Textbooks and Other Educational Media (2023), and Protest and Authoritarian Reaction in Belarus (2023).

Mykola Homanyuk, sociologist, geographer and theatermaker, is an associate professor at Kherson State University, Ukraine. He graduated from N.K. Krupskaia Kherson State Pedagogical Institute and defended his PhD thesis in sociology at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. He has held fellowships at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Indiana University, and the University of Toronto. Since 2022 he has been a member of the Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, and Memory research group at Forum Transregionale Studien and a member of the Contested Ukraine: Military Patriotism, Russian Influence, and Implications for European Security research group. Mykola is the author of numerous articles on mental mapping and toponomy, ethnic studies, as well as memory and commemoration. As a theatermaker he runs the Kherson Theatre Lab and directs documentary theater productions. In 2018 he was awarded the ADAMI Media Prize for Cultural Diversity in Eastern Europe.

Moderator and Discussant

Violeta Davoliūtė is a professor at Vilnius University, Institute of Political Science and International Relations, Senior Researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History, and Project Leader of Facing the Past: Public History for a Stronger Europe (Horizon Europe, 2022-2025). A specialist in cultural memory and social trauma, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and has recently held fellowships at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, Yale University, EHESS, and Uppsala University. Her latest publications include “Perpetrator Postmemory and the Holocaust in Purple Mist (2019) and Izaokas (2019),” Slavic and East European Journal, 67.3 (2023): 363-379, and “The Gaze of the Implicated Subject: Non-Jewish Testimony to Communal Violence during the German Occupation of Lithuania,” East European Politics and Societies 37.2 (2023): 493-511.