Memory and ritual

Anthropologist Alexander Arkhipov in an interview with the Vitrust publication argues :

“When the“ Immortal Regiment ”just appeared, this action was based on a pretty and popular idea that veterans are leaving and we must maintain the memory of those who fought. Not in the sense that “we can repeat”, but in the sense that people who have undergone different deprivations go away, and we lose touch with those times. Therefore, let's try to recall those who died during the war, and save family memory. This was originally the “Immortal Regiment”: it was built on the idea of ​​a difficult family memory of the war.

The action more than ten years ago was invented by Tomsk journalists [Igor Dmitriev, Sergey Lapenkov and Sergey Kolotovkin], and it began as a rather opposition phenomenon. But then the “Immortal Regiment” appropriated the Russian state, and it began to develop in a completely different direction. Since 2014, very significant changes have occurred with this action, and, unfortunately, they have largely influenced how people perceive the current war.

We were engaged in this topic a lot, our research group went to different cities. We studied why people participate or do not participate in the “Immortal Regiment”, what meanings they invest in this action. Our studies have shown: in fact, there is no single idea of ​​either the war or about this tradition. People participate in the action, for example, because a specific woman Masha does not want her mother, a nurse, to forget, as well as her hardships, her sorrow during the war. And therefore, she will carry her portrait - so that her mother would give the honors that she was devoid of during her life.

But when the state takes control of the Immortal Regiment, this action has a very important new meaning. <...>

She, as it were, correlates that great war and the great victory - and ( the current conflict - Polit.ru ). We seem to fight the values ​​of the collective West, and in order to win in this war, we must constantly show heroism, like our ancestors. And the people with whom my colleagues and my colleagues recorded an interview before 2022 said "I went out with a portrait of my grandfather to show these Naziks in the West that this is our victory and they will not take it away." Back in 2014, I met a woman who, having heard about what horrors the Nazis create in Ukraine, made a huge shield of plastic plugs from bottles with the inscription “Do not steal victory”. That is, even then, some people had the feeling that they were trying to deprive them of victories. ”