Sheltering the Ghosts? Digitized Photographs of Political Victims and World War II Veterans on Russian Online Databases

Abstract

In this article I consider Russian online databases that collect, digitize and organize film-based photographs showing Russian victims and participants of the twentieth-century political cataclysms, primarily World War II (WWII) and Stalin’s political terror. Most of these photographs are pre-WWII portraits from private photographic collections and family albums. The article focuses on their transformation into heritage assets which arguably occurs once they become publicly accessible through inclusion in online databases created by politically-motivated organizations such as the Memorial society, the Sakharov Center, Immortal Regiment, Immortal Barrack and Immortal Regiment of Russia. Through discussion of the structures of the databases, analysis of the ways in which they display the photographs, and comparison between them, the article shows that the digitization of the photographs is able to offer political presence to missing people through the multiplication and maintenance of their appearances in the public sphere. This presence is used in two different ways. First, the digitization of the photographs discussed here has enabled liberals in Russia to use them for the purpose of commemoration, which has turned them into a form of an online memorial to the victims of political cataclysms. At the same time, the digitized portraits of WWII veterans have been used by the Immortal Regiment of Russia for what can be called “the political mobilization of the dead.”