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Soviet War Memorials and the Men Who Made Them
Wednesday, May 2, 2018 @ 12:00 pm
Please join us for a talk with Mischa Gabowitsch, research fellow at the Einstein Forum, Potsdam, Germany.
Alone among European countries, the Soviet Union did not commemorate World War I, a conflict it considered bourgeois and imperialist. Yet by the end of World War II, monuments to the heroism of Red Army soldiers were being erected from Berlin to Pyongyang that looked a lot like the earlier European models. Why did Soviet war memorials follow classical examples, evading any avant-garde influence? And why are so many more being built today in a style that often strikes foreign observers as being bombastic and antiquated – most recently at Russia’s new national cemetery outside Moscow? To answer these questions, this talk will look at the evolution of Russian military art from pre-revolutionary times to today. It will focus particularly on the crucial role of Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, the celebrated military and political leader who was also the Soviet Union’s most powerful patron of the arts, and his network of artistic clients.
Mischa Gabowitsch is a historian and sociologist. He is an alumnus fellow of the Princeton University Society of Fellows and previous editor-in-chief of the Russian journals NZ and Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research. His most recent book publications in English are Protest in Putin’s Russia (2016) and Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities (2017). He has edited several books in Russian and German on war memory and commemoration in Russia and beyond, and is currently working on a history of Soviet war memorials.