The Immortal Regiment — Processional Sovereignty

Each 9 May, across Russia and its occupied territories, a ritual procession winds through central squares: the Immortal Regiment (Bessmertnyy polk). Citizens carry photographs of their deceased relatives who served in the Great Patriotic War, holding them aloft on poles, walking in ordered columns through Theatre Square in Luhansk, Red Square in Moscow, parade grounds in Donetsk, Stakhanov, Alchevsk, Pervomaisk, Krasnodon.

The procession looks civic, grassroots, spontaneous. Families bring their own photographs. The emotional register is mourning and honour. No single ruler organises it. It is the warmest-seeming of Russian public rituals.

It is also one of the most sophisticated Disinfolklore archetypes Russia has ever produced.

From Genuine Civic Initiative to Imperial Liturgy

The Immortal Regiment was founded in 2012 in Tomsk by local journalists. It was a genuine civic initiative. Within three years, the Kremlin had captured, scaled, and weaponised it.

By 2015, Immortal Regiment processions were being centrally coordinated, state-sponsored, photographed for state media, attended by Putin, and then exported to occupied Donbas. The grassroots ritual became an imperial liturgy.

Processional Sovereignty

The procession performs Processional Sovereignty. Three cognitive mechanisms operate at once.

Mechanism 1 — Inherited Legitimacy

By carrying photographs of Great Patriotic War veterans, participants archetypally claim descent from the 1945 victors. The sovereign regime — Putin’s Russia, or its Luhansk proxy — stands downstream of this inheritance. To process with the photograph is to acknowledge the regime as the veterans’ rightful heir.

Mechanism 2 — Personal Participation in Empire

Unlike a parade, the Immortal Regiment requires active physical participation. You carry your grandfather’s photograph. Your arms bear the weight. Your feet walk the route. The embodied ritual archetypes your body into the empire’s body. You are no longer a spectator. You are a participant in the sovereign performance.

Mechanism 3 — Public Visibility of Loyalty

To carry a photograph through a public square is to be seen to be loyal. To not carry one is to be seen as disloyal. The Immortal Regiment converts private family history into a loyalty test administered in the street.

The Dark Inversion

Many of the veterans whose photographs are carried in the Immortal Regiment died fighting Germans who had invaded Ukraine. In 2022, their grandchildren would be ordered to fight the Ukrainians whose grandfathers fought alongside the photographed veterans.

The archetype inverted itself: the 1945-Victors-against-Nazi-invaders became the rhetorical inheritance of 2022-Invaders-calling-Ukrainians-Nazis.

This inversion is the deepest horror of the Immortal Regiment archetype. A legitimate civic mourning ritual was captured, weaponised, exported into occupied territory, and used to manufacture the cognitive conditions for a future invasion that would kill the descendants of the people being memorialised.

The Counter

Carry your own grandfather’s photograph on a different day. Not on 9 May. Not in the central square. Privately, at the graveside.

The Immortal Regiment’s power depends on public, coordinated, state-visible procession. Withdraw the procession and the archetype dissolves.

Founded: 2012, Tomsk (Igor Dmitriev, Sergei Kolotovkin, Sergei Lapenkov)

Captured by Kremlin: 2015; exported to occupied Donbas 2015-2022; continues to present.