Even a Cemetery Is Affected by the War

The seminar will take place online, 18 November at 11:00 am CET.
Please register in order to participate >> [2]

Abstract
This paper examines the transformation of cemeteries in Russia in the context of the ongoing war, authoritarian politics, and the digital age. Traditionally, burial spaces functioned as sites of social cohesion, where the dead remained integrated into the community of the living. Yet armed conflict and its mass casualties have profoundly unsettled these patterns, pushing death into the public sphere and reshaping both the material and symbolic dimensions of commemoration.
Military funerals no longer represent private or modest events but have become highly mediated performances, intertwined with official narratives and subject to censorship and informational warfare. At the same time, cemeteries emerge as arenas of contestation, where questions of social inequality, hierarchy, and legitimacy are negotiated through burial practices and disputes over prestigious plots. The paper explores these developments within broader debates on death tourism and digital remembrance.

Bio:
Dr Oleg Reut is a Philipp Schwartz Fellow at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz leading the research project on Who Chooses to Remember? The Russian Diaspora’s Commemoration of Russia’s Unnamed War, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His academic interests include death studies, collective memory, escaped memory, and diasporic remembrance.

About the seminar series:
Series „Postcolonial perspectives–postdependance entanglements” is organized in frames of two research projects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions in the post-multiple colonial RussianFar East”,no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and SocialMemory and the Post-ImperialRussianHeritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.