‘Our Russian Passport’: First World War Monuments, Transnational Commemoration, and the Russian Emigration in Europe, 1918–39

Abstract

The existence of so many Russian war monuments outside Russia adds a new dimension to our understanding of the memorialization of the First World War, for such memorials were found not in Russia but in European countries where Russian emigres made lives for themselves after the 1917 Revolution. The construction of war monuments promised to be a good way to manage important aspects of the personal and public bereavement that Russian people faced in European diaspora in the interwar period. Emigres, moreover, also used war memorials as a means to signify their right to belong to a common European experience, and elites in countries like France, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia integrated Russia’s war, through the emigres, into national commemorative practices. This article shows that transnational values like international friendship, wartime alliance, and solidarity across national and ethnic boundaries could be important parts of the commemorative culture of the war in nation-states across interwar Europe, even in Germany. Without these transnational features of First World War remembrance, which both encouraged the emigres to build war monuments and to some degree impeded their appearance in the Soviet Union, there may not have been Russian monuments to the war anywhere at all.