Military memorial heritage as a social phenomenon and an international legal problem: on the way to a solution

Abstract

This article discusses conceptual approaches to understanding the problem of international legal protection of Soviet monuments, military graves and places of memory of the Great Patriotic War (military memorial heritage (MMH) sites) in the form of the formation of a new sub-branch of international law — military memorial law, the necessity of introducing the concept of "military memorial heritage" into legal circulation is justified, a mechanism for the legal protection of MMH sites is proposed. The article outlines some issues of the formation of a special International Charter "On the protection of the military memorial heritage", and reveals a number of its legal aspectsworked out in social practice by the tools of public diplomacy during the International Relay of Memory and Gratitude "The Fatherland of a Feat — to the Fatherland of a Hero".The material for the study is made up of the works of Russian and foreign scientists and social practitioners in the field of historical and social memory, considering monuments and memorial places symbolizing the exploits and victims of the Great Patriotic War as sites of a specific heritage of civilization that require special legal protection at both national and supranational and international levels. The experimental project in which the first regulatory standards were worked out in the field of perpetuating the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland in the projections of a number of inter-municipal agreements is the Russian electric power industry and the distribution power grid complex.By the methods of participant observation and independent legal expert review, during the implementation of more than 20 inter-municipal agreements established on the basis of the feats of citizens of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War (40 villages and cities with a population of 2 million people), as well as by monitoring the situation with the preservation of monuments in more than 200 villages and cities of about 10 countries of the world, a number of regulatory norms have been worked for the future international legal act in the format of a Charter (or Convention), their description is given and the author's version of the proposed structure is formulated.