Perpetration and Victimhood on the Kremlin's Doorstep: A Landscape of Great Terror Memory
Author(s): Margaret A Comer
Year: 2018
Summary
Moscow was heavily affected by Stalinist terror, since many targeted groups were concentrated there. It was also, however, a concentrated center of perpetration, since the designers of the purges and multi-faceted ‘apparatus of terror’ were based there. Today, the buildings formerly occupied by the NKVD still stand in central Moscow. Within a five-minute walk in any direction, one can find, among other sites, a garage where thousands of Muscovites were shot, the FSB’s current headquarters, and an infamous former prison. There are few permanent memorials or markers to this period and its victims in the area, but various groups use digital technology, public ceremonies, and small, privately funded initiatives to form an alternate memorial landscape. This paper will accordingly review and analyze these official and alternate memoryscapes in order to better understand the balance of power in contemporary Russian conceptions of the ‘dark heritage’ of the Great Terror era.
Cite this Record
Perpetration and Victimhood on the Kremlin's Doorstep: A Landscape of Great Terror Memory. Margaret A Comer. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441468)
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Keywords
General
dark heritage
•
Memorialization
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Repression
Geographic Keywords
United Kingdom
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Western Europe
Temporal Keywords
Twentieth Century
Spatial Coverage
min long: -8.158; min lat: 49.955 ; max long: 1.749; max lat: 60.722 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 1011