In Russia, commemorations of the Soviet victory are multiplying. Some parades are organized by civilians, others are more official. All bear witness to the rise of a nationalism that Putin wants to embody.
Appearing during the 2010s in Russia, the Immortal Regiments designate new spectacular ways of commemorating the Soviet victory over the Nazis, which see the population marching while brandishing the portraits of their ancestors who lived through the war. Initially organized spontaneously, these new parades quickly interested the authorities who then included them in the program of official celebrations. Thus, for the 70e anniversary of the armistice, on May 9, 2015, the Moscow procession was authorized for the first time to pass through Red Square and included Vladimir Putin himself among its participants. Since then, the operation brings together millions of people each year – one million in Moscow and ten million throughout Russia in 2018 – and also mobilizes Russian communities around the world, such as in France where parades have taken place in a dozen cities.
(Geo)political uses of a sacred victory
While during the Soviet era, parades in honor of the 1945 victory were almost non-existent, how did this commemoration become, in just a few years, the main celebration in Russia? How can we explain the success of this original form of celebration that involves civilians parading, symbolically bringing together the living and the dead? This is the enigma that Galia Ackerman’s book aims to answer. A trained historian, journalist and translator, and author of numerous works on the countries of the post-Soviet space, particularly Russia and Ukraine, she sees the immortal regiments as the submerged tip of the iceberg, a phenomenon that crystallizes both the heavy historical legacy weighing on the country, but also the political and geopolitical choices of its current leaders.
The first part of the book looks back over past centuries and the common thread that, according to the author, constitutes the “messianic tradition” that animates the Russian people and gives overall coherence to a turbulent history. From the XVIe century, the notion of Holy Russia and the designation of Moscow as a “third Rome”, protector of the Orthodox faith, accompanied a process of territorial expansion resulting in the formation of one of the greatest empires in history. The Bolshevik revolution replaced a messianic idea with another placing Russia, from the point of view of its leaders, at the forefront of humanity. The invasion of the Nazis in 1941 brought about a decisive nationalist turning point with Stalin’s rapprochement with the Orthodox Church and the selective use of symbols of imperial Russia in order to mobilize the population. The “Great Patriotic War” then allowed the Soviets to pose as liberators against the absolute Evil embodied by Nazism, while considerably expanding their geopolitical sphere of influence. According to Galia Ackerman, this pride deeply permeated the consciousness of the Soviet and more particularly Russian population during the decades that followed the Stalinist era while maintaining a relationship of distrust and envy with regard to the West in a context marked by shortages. The collapse of theUSSR was thus experienced by a large part of the population as a tragedy, with a feeling of humiliation quickly added to the trauma of economic and social difficulties due to the abrupt transition to capitalism.
In the second part, the author then shows how this historical legacy associated with the shock of a chaotic transition to democracy and capitalism served as the basis for the establishment of a “Sovietism without communism”. The rehabilitation of the Soviet period, put in place with Putin’s arrival in power, then accompanies the hardening of political life and the growing control over the media. At the same time, the reunification of the Orthodox Church abroad allows the gathering of “compatriots” scattered across the four corners of the world and the strengthening of Moscow’s influence beyond its borders. The enterprise of rewriting history, which encourages a patriotic and reconciled reading of Russia’s past, then grants a central place to the Second World War, obscuring its darkest or most ambiguous episodes. The victory over the Nazis then allows us to reconnect with messianic rhetoric and to feed the imperial nationalism at work in Putin’s Russia by making, to paraphrase the author, the identity of the victorious people not only a past glory, but “a quality immanent to the Russian people” (p. 140).
The last part looks at the effects of this mode of legitimation by making the militarization of Russian society one of its main recent transformations. This process is expressed in various projects including the creation from 2012 of a Military-Historical Society that organizes excursions and reenactments, a youth movement “Young Army” that at the end of 2018 brought together more than 250,000 young volunteers, and the proliferation of military-patriotic amusement parks. According to Galia Ackerman, this militarization of society, and in particular of the youngest, serves both domestic political objectives – consolidating a unanimous and patriotic narrative around the personality of Vladimir Putin – as well as a geopolitical strategy of extending the zone of influence of a Russia increasingly hostile to the West. In this context, the immortal regiment allows the incarnation in the eyes of all of “the intrinsic moral superiority of the victorious people” (p. 265) whose adversaries are, in fact, assimilated to fascists, among whom the Ukrainians have notably figured since the Maidan revolution in 2014.
The springs of a communication operation
The ability of the Russian state to mobilize the population, both within and outside its borders, to a large extent, around the commemoration of the victory over the Nazis is a fascinating subject. Convincingly arguing that the immortal regiments are a relevant entry point for considering many dimensions of the country’s trajectory, Galia Ackerman offers an essay that is as coherent in the thesis it defends as it is broad in the aspects it considers. On the history of Russia since the XVIe century, to the current interventions in Ukraine and Syria, through the nebula of nationalist intellectuals, the attention paid to the context goes beyond in many respects the analysis of the object itself, which retains part of its mystery. It is thus necessary to have gone beyond more than half of the development before the Immortal Regiments as such are again mentioned. The author then raises a certain number of problems which would merit the conduct of full-fledged empirical investigations in the future.
The first point that could be the subject of further investigation concerns the history of the Regiments themselves and their transformation from their appearance to their recovery by the State. Indeed Galia Ackerman indicates that the system consisting of citizens parading in honor of the victory of theUSSR against the Nazis by brandishing portraits of veterans actually dates back to the Soviet era. At that time, they were rather spontaneous demonstrations without any particular support from the authorities, which therefore took place in a very punctual and isolated manner. It was then from 2011 that journalists from the city of Tomsk, located in Siberia, seized on the idea and came up with a name for the procession: the Immortal Regiment. At that stage, she writes, it was mainly about doing justice to the memory of the millions of victims of the war and giving citizens the opportunity to participate in the festivities as well as – symbolically – their ancestors, victims and witnesses of the events. An in-depth study of the instigators of the operation, its first participants and its rapid dissemination methods – before 2015 – in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Israel in particular, would allow us to learn more about the factors of these first successes and also to better understand the turning point represented by the appropriation by the central State of the Immortal Regiments. To what extent did it cause an ideological readjustment, a change in the sociological composition of the participants – in addition to the numerical massification –, with what reactions on the part of the organizers and original participants?
The second question concerns the modalities of mobilization, once the operation finds itself under the control of the Russian state and acquires the scale mentioned above at the cost of its original spontaneity. Knowing the symbolic importance taken by the procession for the leaders, one can wonder to what extent mechanisms similar to those observed during election periods are at work. These may be selective incentives or specific pressures on certain organizations or categories of the population particularly dependent on the state to push them to participate. One can also consider the hypothesis that the organizers on the ground are subject to quantified objectives or even to competition between villages, cities, regions vis-à-vis the central authorities. Finally, with regard to the geopolitical dimension, one can also question the springs of the mobilization of “compatriots” abroad by asking the question of the relays and means deployed: Russian diplomats, Orthodox Church, etc.
The analysis of the means deployed to mobilize participants is directly linked to a third possible line of investigation into the reception of the Immortal Regiments by the population. Galia Ackerman emphasizes the traumatic nature of the memory linked to the war, its millions of dead and the fact that no Soviet family was spared. This then raises the question of the articulation between this memory, the existence or not of a transmission between generations, and what she calls the “fetishization of victory” (p. 163) recently carried out by the Russian state. While, undeniably, the population joins massively to participate in these demonstrations, the part of conformism, obligation, patriotic pride that accompanies Russia’s current return to the international scene or that of the desire to pay tribute to the suffering of previous generations remains unknown for the moment. Thus in 2019, the ban in certain regions on brandishing portraits of Stalin or red flags during processions provoked virulent reactions from the Communist Party. In response, its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, launched the “The Color of Victory is Red” campaign on the internet, which indicates that the Immortal Regiments can be the subject of differentiated appropriations as well as political controversies behind the unanimous and homogeneous facade that they present at first glance.
In conclusion, we can highlight the central role, cited several times by Galia Ackerman, played by communication and with it the spin doctors in Russian political life, both in the governance of internal affairs and in international influence strategies. Investment in one-off, high-profile operations – of which the Immortal Regiments are one of the most successful manifestations – to the detriment of the permanent mobilization of the population via mass organizations and a coherent ideology is a major discontinuity between Soviet governmentality and present-day Russia. Galia Ackerman’s essay, by focusing primarily on historical legacies, also implicitly opens up the possibility of a discussion that would open up the Russian case and allow us to consider the phenomena mentioned in light of trends observable elsewhere: on the forms taken by nationalism in the context of globalization and all the practices of rewriting history that it engenders, on the militarization of societies, including Western ones, or on the impact of communication on the governance of consciences.