The Soviet Revenant — Great Patriotic War Square

In European folklore, the revenant is the dead who will not stay dead. The walking corpse. The ghost with unfinished business. The ancestor who shows up at the door, dirty, uninvited, demanding the bread from the hearth.

In Russia-occupied Luhansk, there is a revenant in every public square. Its name is the Soviet Union.

The Diagnostic Item

7 August 2015, lug-info.com, a press-conference announcement:

“12:00 — Official representative of ‘LPR’ People’s Militia Taras Kholodkov, ‘On the situation along the contact line’. Address: Heroes’ of the Great Patriotic War Square, 9 (Ploshiad Geroiev VOV, 9).”

Read the address again. Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square. This is the address the occupation uses to send correspondents to a briefing on shelling. The address itself is a Disinfolklore item. It is doing work before a single word of the briefing is spoken.

What the Address Does

The Great Patriotic War — this is the Russian name for what the West calls the Second World War’s Eastern Front. Twenty-seven million Soviet dead. The most sacred memory in Russian public culture. The memory that the Soviet state, and then the Putin Federation, curated for seventy years as the ultimate moral foundation: we defeated Nazism. We saved the world. We paid in blood. We are the good side of history.

When Russia occupies Luhansk in 2014 and summons journalists to a briefing, it does not use a neutral address. It uses Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square. Because the address does three things at once.

First — Inherited Legitimacy

The address archetypes the occupation as the spiritual continuation of the Soviet victory. The men standing at the podium in 2015 are, by spatial association, the grandsons of the men who took Berlin. To attend their briefing is to attend a memorial service.

Second — The Bogey Made

If the LPR is standing on “Great Patriotic War Square” then Ukraine, grammatically and spatially, is cast as the Nazi. The square makes the bogeyman. The bogeyman makes the invasion.

Third — The Ghost Summoned

The Soviet Union is officially dead — it expired on 25 December 1991. But in Luhansk’s Ploshiad Geroiev VOV, it is not dead. It is walking. It has an address. You can post a letter to it.

The Warmth of the Ghost

Most residents of Luhansk lived a substantial part of their lives in the USSR. Many grieve its loss. The Russian occupation offers them, in the form of public squares, parades, flags, and vocabularies, the feeling of the lost thing. It sells them a ghost, and the ghost is warm.

This is why the Luhansk corpus is full of Victory Day parades, Immortal Regiment processions, St George ribbons, Stalin-era Young Guard imagery, and Komsomol-style youth formations. The Soviet Revenant is the spine of the occupation’s emotional architecture. It is how the occupation persuades its captive population that they have not been conquered but returned.

The Counter

Remember what the USSR actually did: Holodomor, the Gulag, the suppression of Ukrainian language, the deportations, the stagnation, the queue.

The revenant is sentimental. The real dead are not.

Name the ghost. Ask what year it died. Ask why it walks.