Staging Memory, Making the Sacred: Ritual, Symbol, and Digital Practice in Russia’s Immortal Regiment

Abstract

Russia’s Immortal Regiment (IR) has become the largest public ritual of remembrance of the Great Patriotic War in post-Soviet Russia, combining family commemoration with an officially curated performance of unity and loyalty. Drawing on video microanalysis of IR marches, ethnographic observation, and a digital ethnography of approximately 1 million Instagram posts with IR-related hashtags collected in 2020, the article asks how the ritual generates collective emotions that temporarily reconcile contradictory motivations—grief for victims, pride for victors, nostalgia, and alignment with state narratives. It argues that IR’s symbolic ambiguity enables broad participation while facilitating state co-optation: The initial victim-centered, “necronominalist” impulse to honor individual lives is increasingly reframed as a canonized patriotic rite in which the fallen are absorbed into a collective national body. Instagram materials show that visible IR content is dominated by institutionally affiliated actors using standardized designs and hashtags in “reporting” and “promoting” modalities, revealing patriotic memory work as a bureaucratic deliverable (tufta) more than a vernacular expression. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic intensified this administrative logic through home-based flash mob campaigns, while typo-based hashtag sampling exposed vernacular participation and parasitic exploitation of tags. The Immortal Regiment appears less as a spontaneous mobilization than as a managed technology for staging sacred symbols and projecting mass solidarity under conditions where genuine mass mobilization is politically risky.

Article in English