Victory Day, family style

Abstract

This chapter explores its relationship to the Soviet commemorative repertoire and analyzes the 2015 Moscow March of the Immortal Regiment in situ to show how this event directed and energized parade goers. The March originated as a grassroots civic initiative in a Siberian city of Tomsk in 2012 and in just a few years it spread across Russia and beyond. The Tomsk organizers conceived their initiative as a counterpoint to the officialdom of state-sponsored Victory Day celebrations. The Immortal Regiment’s original conception challenged this vacuous triumphalism and broadened the terms of participation in war commemoration by inviting citizens to honour family members regardless of their role in the war. The collective memory of the war is indeed a collective habit memory, a set of affective dispositions toward the war that Russian citizens have incorporated through repetitive participation in rituals of commemoration. The latent conservatism of these commemorative scenarios is activated when parade goers are surrounded by orchestrated manifestations of triumphalism.