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Monuments and Territory – Interview with Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk

In our latest PoSoCoMeS online seminar, we were delighted to host Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk, who engaged in a discussion with Ekaterina Haskins and Yuliya Yurchuk about their new book, Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine (Central European University Press, 2025). Mischa and Mykola examine how Russian invaders have engaged with war memorials in occupied Ukraine since 2022 – destroying some, restoring others, and building new ones while using them for propaganda. Drawing on rare sources, including on-the-ground ethnography from occupied Kherson, they reveal how Russian forces acted on their own myths about Soviet memorials and explore the broader link between monuments and imperial territorial claims.

The seminar sparked a lively discussion and brought up many fascinating insights. If you couldn’t join us live, you can catch the full recording on YouTube.

Beyond the seminar, we also interviewed Mischa and Mykola about their work. We hope you enjoy the interview – feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or get in touch with us or the authors via email!


Considering your firsthand experiences during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, what sparked the idea for this book?

Mykola Homanyuk: On February 24, I was on a night train traveling from Kyiv to Kherson, my hometown. At sunrise, I watched as the airport in Mykolaiv burned, then the airport in Kherson, and then I saw a massive number of people leaving the city. I decided to stay. From the very first days, my friends and colleagues from around the world began reaching out, offering help. One of those people was Mischa. That’s how it all started.
 

Mischa Gabowitsch: Mykola’s first idea when I contacted him was that we organize something like an academic airlift for the community of Kherson State University faculty and students who were stuck in the already occupied city but were trying to keep up their teaching and research in Ukrainian. The result was a ten-day series of daily Zoom lectures in Ukrainian and English by scholars from different countries that we called an Academic Bridge. After that we kept in touch and continued the conversation about war memorials, especially in rural areas, that we had started before the full-scale invasion.

MH: It quickly became clear to us that the occupiers were paying an extraordinary amount of attention to memorials in the territories they had seized. This wasn’t improvised although some improvisation did occur. It was evident that they had a strategy. That’s why we felt it was important to document ephemeral materials that might be lost to future historians if we didn’t collect them records detailing how the occupiers dealt with memorials in the occupied areas. These documents exist because the Russian invaders came equipped not only with weapons but also with victory banners, mobile eternal flames, and ceremonial uniforms for honor guards. Memorials became stages where these symbolic tools were deployed.

MG: Our initial idea was to write an article about the invaders’ policies regarding war memorials in the occupied territories. But when we started writing, we realized that our sources were so rich and there were so many interesting analytical angles that we would have to write a whole book.

This transition to writing a book certainly shows how complex and layered the subject became. Now, in terms of gathering your research, how did you approach it? Did you dive into archives, talk to eyewitnesses or experts, or take another route?

MH: We used multiple sources: on-site observations, Telegram channels, other online platforms, interviews with officials, Russian propaganda newspapers, leaflets, and billboards. For fieldwork, we took an almost archaeological approach analyzing material remnants of commemorative practices. This included inscriptions on wreaths, candles, candies, religious artifacts, and modifications to memorials. These traces helped us reconstruct what had happened and interpret their possible meanings. As for archival research, our book is deeply rooted in it. After Kherson was liberated, I was invited to help establish a special collection within the State Archive dedicated to the Russian occupation period. Our indexes and case descriptions hundreds of them became part of that archive.

MG: In addition, we also drew on the archival research on Soviet war memorials that I had been doing for years, both in Ukraine and in other countries. But for the period since February 2022, it was Mykola who collected the bulk of the material, especially in the earliest stages. He did fieldwork in occupied Kherson at great personal risk for himself. My task during those months was primarily to back up all the sources he kept sending me so that he could delete them from his devices, which could be searched by the Russian military and FSB at any time. I was constantly worried for him, but he kept telling me that focusing on this research kept him sane amid the stress of living under occupation just as working on this project with him gave me a sense of doing something meaningful. Mykola’s detailed knowledge and network of contacts in the regions he knows best allowed him to notice many important details which helped us identify what to look for when we were studying other occupied regions through online sources.

The risks involved in gathering the material are truly remarkable. Were there any particular challenges that arose during this process? What was the toughest part of working on this project?

MH: Working with ephemeral sources was particularly challenging. Telegram channels and other online materials would appear and disappear, forcing us to find replacements or verify information through other means.

MG: Saving such data is one thing, but preserving them in a way that makes it possible to reference the original source after it’s gone offline can be surprisingly tricky.

What are the biggest takeaways from your research – anything that really surprised you?

MG: I have worked on Soviet war memorials for many years, but I never cease to be amazed by the multiplicity of meanings they continue to carry for people 80 years after the end of the Second World War, even if they look simple and unoriginal at first glance.

MH: I had never considered that a monument could have a biography a life that doesn’t end even when the physical monument is gone. Its story continues in the pedestal left behind, in an empty space, or in whatever replaces it. Our research helped us see how a monument’s life cycle reflects broader social changes.

These insights about monuments certainly offer a new perspective on their role in our society. If readers were to take away just one thing from your book, what should it be?

MH: Don’t overlook the periphery. It might just save the world.

MG: If the only monuments you’ve seen in a country are the prominent ones in big cities, then you don’t know anything about monuments in that country. If you want to get an idea of their meaning, go to small towns and villages to get a sense of the entire monumentscape.

I love this idea of the “monumentscape.” If you had the chance to dig deeper into one aspect of your book, what would you explore next?

MH: We’ve observed that certain changes to monuments both before and during the war happened simultaneously in various locations remote from each other. This includes shifts in polychromy (color schemes) and how some monuments managed to survive. In the future, it would be fascinating to study the broader principles behind the evolution of memorials, not just in Ukraine or Europe, but globally.

MG: We are currently working on several joint papers that build on our book. One is about how the memorialization of the dead of the ongoing war is articulated with existing Second World memorials. Another is about Ukraine’s mnemonic pluralism the coexistence of a broad range of regional, local, ethnic, corporate, and other memory traditions and how it proved an asset rather than a liability in the face of Russian aggression.

Given the deep insights you’ve shared, what advice would you give to someone stepping into this field or tackling a similar topic?

MH: Look at memorials and monuments from multiple perspectives not just political, but also aesthetic, geographical, architectural, habitual, and many others. In many cases, a monument’s political meaning is not its most important aspect.

MG: And when you study monuments, always consider the practices associated with them. Monuments are part of the social fabric, and our task as scholars is to understand the role they play in it.

Thank you so much for sharing your fascinating insights with us, Mykola and Mischa! We’re excited to follow your upcoming papers and see how your research continues to shape our understanding of memory, identity, and the politics of commemoration during and after times of war.

 


Mischa Gabowitsch, historian and sociologist, is Professor of Multilingual and Transnational Post-Soviet Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He holds a BA and MA from the University of Oxford and a DEA and PhD from the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, and previously held positions at the Universities of Princeton and Vienna as well as the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, in addition to visiting fellowships at institutes of advanced study in Madrid and Vienna. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and thematic journal issues in various languages on protest and social movements as well as memory and commemoration. These include, in English, The Russian Field: Views from Abroad (2011), Protest in Putin’s Russia (2016), Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities (2017), The Sociology of Belarusian Protest (2021), Beyond Representation: The Visual Analysis of History Textbooks and Other Educational Media (2023), and Protest and Authoritarian Reaction in Belarus (2023).

Mykola Homanyuk, sociologist, geographer and theatermaker, is an associate professor at Kherson State University. He graduated from N.K. Krupskaia Kherson State Pedagogical Institute and defended his PhD thesis in sociology at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. He has held a Lane Kirkland Fellowship at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, a fellowship at the Indiana University-Ukraine Nonresidential Scholars Program, and a fellowship at Petro Jacyk Non-Resident Scholars Program at the University of Toronto. Since 2022 he has been a member of the Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, and Memory research group at Forum Transregionale Studien and a member of the Contested Ukraine: Military Patriotism, Russian Influence, and Implications for European Security research group. Mykola is the author of numerous articles on mental mapping and toponomy, ethnic studies, as well as memory and commemoration. As a theatermaker he runs the Kherson Theatre Lab and directs documentary theater productions. In 2018 he was awarded the ADAMI Media Prize for Cultural Diversity in Eastern Europe.

Photo: Совет министров Республики Крым, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Daria Gordeeva (April 2, 2025). Monuments and Territory – Interview with Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk. PoSoCoMeS Blog. Retrieved March 11, 2026 from https://posocomes.hypotheses.org/389


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