‘No one is Forgotten, Nothing is Forgotten’: Duty, Patriotism, and the Russian Search Movement

Abstract

This article discusses duty in relation to the past, focusing on Russia’s nationwide Search Movement (Poiskovoe dvizhenie). This civil movement of volunteers searches for the remains of fallen soldiers left on the battlefields of World War II all over Russia and has young people as its main target group. Despite in many ways being critical of the state, the Search Movement explicitly wants to make a contribution to the patriotic upbringing of Russian youth. In its work, the movement relates to the official government plans for patriotic education. Several obligations are central to the notion of patriotism: for the Search Movement, an obligation to the past, to remember, is the most important. In this article I will examine how the malleable concept of duty allows the Search Movement to carry out work implicitly critical of state failings in the name of patriotism.