Remembering in public: On the affective management of history

Through a close reading of media reports and public rituals in 2005-2011, associated with the remembering of the Great Patriotic War, the essay traces a sizable mnemonic shift - from the playful retrofitting of the past in the late 1990s, with its aesthetics of ironic noninvolvement, to the obvious attempts to envision "history" as an assemblage of emotionally charged objects, undertaken during the past decade. Following two phenomena - forms of memorialization realized in the process of embodiment, and a desire for historical connectivity fulfilled through acts of memorial linking - the article shows how these two kinds of mnemonic activity emerge as dominant ways of approaching and organizing the Soviet experience of the Great Patriotic War in postmillennial Russia.