Necro-Icons

Russian State Commemorative Practice and National Mythmaking During the Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

Abstract

This paper investigates the practices and politics of memorialisation of Russian war casualties since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Drawing on Russian and Soviet legacies of the memorial image, it looks at the ways in which the Russian state has used its war dead for propagandistic and social engineering purposes over the last two years; alongside this investigation, it examines the significance of the necroimage (a term used here to describe Barthes’ concept of ‘a living image of a dead thing’) in relation to the Russian state’s practices of mythmaking and self-justification. Ultimately, viewing these mythmaking practices in relation to the works of Roland Barthes and Francois Hartog, I propose a new way of viewing the Putinist regime's self-image: as a death-mask, constructed around a metamodern articulation of Russian temporality; a mechanism of national self-commemoration.