The Church of the Sacred Dead

On the anniversary of invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany I went with a Russian friend, who is both a Russian Air Force colonel and a military liaison officer at the British Embassy, and the American Military Attache in Moscow, to the national military shrine at Poklonny Gori to a remembrance event in the gigantic memorial complex, erected in 1996 to commemorate the sacrifice that the Soviet people made to help defeat Nazism. (After the USSR had spent two nearly years trying to help Hitler defeat Britain and the Dominions.)

This shot is of the crypt-like space in the basement where the main ceremony of laying wreaths took place at 3 p.m. There was no great crowd at either the concert upstairs or at the wreath-laying here. Remembrance Day in London attracts massively more people. In Russia the state seems to want, perhaps for political reasons, to preserve the memorialisation of something which the people want to forget, though without forgetting the actual people who died. Russians do not ignore the past, far from it, but my impression is that they do not want their remembering to be organised by the government. The parallels with state-sponsored Orthodox Christian revivalism seem to me to be close.