Successors to the Great Victory: Afghan Veterans in Post-Soviet Belarus

Ackermann, Felix

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-66523-8_8

Felix Ackermann⁸

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ((PMMS))

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Abstract

This chapter explores the shifting evolution and public negotiation of the meaning of Belarusian war memory, through a study of two post-Soviet memorials in Belarus: the Island of Tears, a memorial to the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), officially opened in central Minsk in 1996, and the Stalin Line, a memorial to the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), opened on the western outskirts of Minsk in 2006. This analysis traces the multiple ways in which these two memorials connect and reconstitute the memories of these two wars in new and sometimes unexpected ways, both transforming existing post-Soviet narrative elements and combining them with newly invented visions of the past as a means of updating the Soviet legacy to fit the current context.

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German Historical Institute Warsaw, Pałac Karnickich, Aleje Ujazdowskie 39, 00-540, Warsaw, Poland
Felix Ackermann

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The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Julie Fedor
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Markku Kangaspuro
Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, Finland
Jussi Lassila
Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, Austria
Tatiana Zhurzhenko

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Ackermann, F. (2017). Successors to the Great Victory: Afghan Veterans in Post-Soviet Belarus. In: Fedor, J., Kangaspuro, M., Lassila, J., Zhurzhenko, T. (eds) War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus . Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66523-8_8

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66523-8_8
Published: 06 December 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66523-8
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