War Monuments and the Transformation of Russian Memorial Culture in the Long 20th Century

Aaron J. Cohen’s comparatively short volume is the first book-length survey, in any language, of Russian and Soviet war monuments in the long 20th century. As an introduction to the topic it is, in some respects, an exemplary piece of scholarly writing. It is pithy, original, precise yet wide-ranging, rigorous in its definitions and approach but also generous toward other perspectives and frank about its own limitations. It brings together recent debates in history, sociology, memory studies, cultural studies, and art history and draws on an impressive variety of archival sources spanning a century and ranging from Khabarovsk to Nantes and from Berkeley to Samara. In addition to the literature in Russian, it also draws on detailed and important German-language case studies that other Anglophone historians of Soviet war memorials have often neglected.¹

Framed by a lucid discussion of how monuments’ materiality sets them apart from more purely narrative or symbolic genres of commemoration, Cohen’s most important contribution is his exploration of war monuments in the first half of the 20th century. He devotes far fewer pages to the period since World War II, which has seen an explosion in the number of Soviet or Russian war monuments domestically and abroad. Yet by focusing on late imperial Russia, World War I monuments inside Russia and among émigrés, and the Bolsheviks’ lack of sustained interest in building Civil War monuments, Cohen lays the groundwork for a deeper understanding of monument-building efforts since 1945, when monuments to Red Army soldiers became the most ubiquitous type of war memorial on the planet and directly or indirectly influenced the organization and aesthetics of monument creation from Yugoslavia to Zimbabwe.

The introduction presents several arguments about Russian monument construction. The most important of these applies beyond the Russian case. Discussions of monuments still often proceed as if they were just material embodiments of narrative, and what matters, therefore, is representation: monuments, then, can be interpreted alongside texts, films, and two-dimensional pictures. This approach remains dominant in provinces of art history and cultural studies that draw inspiration from an Aby Warburg-style comparative analysis of imagery as well as in the kind of political iconography popular among students of present-day memory politics.² Against this, Cohen argues that “we can learn more about monuments if we understand them as physical objects in public space and not just as symbols inside a broader propaganda or ideological discourse” (xix). His book, accordingly, “is more about war monuments as objects and less about the sites of memory they represent” (xx)—more about the “memorial culture” that produces—or fails to produce—particular kinds of monuments and less about the mnemonic contents they enshrine.

This is an important distinction, for it draws attention to the conditions under which monuments are commissioned and manufactured. Much more than poetry, novels, and even paintings, monumental sculpture relies on a costly and labor-intensive infrastructure. No large public monument can be created without quarries, transportation, foundries, and a permit or some other kind of guarantee against swift removal. Nor can it appear without casters, engineers, and a setting crew. This makes monumental sculpture “more dependent on official power and state resources, less connected to a broad public of consumers, and less shaped by individual creativity” (xxii).

That observation could be nuanced further by tweaking one’s definition of a “monument.” After all, numerous memorials to victims of war and mass murder, sometimes of impressive proportions, were produced by Soviet and Russian citizens by pooling their own resources or diverting state-owned ones, as Arkadi Zeltser has meticulously shown for memorials to Holocaust victims.³ But Cohen’s focus, as the book’s title indicates, is not on war monuments’ role in helping people deal with personal loss and private sorrow. Rather he is interested in public displays of patriotism, where patriotism is taken to cover...