The Materiality of Memory: Hero Cities as Mechanisms of Memory Co-Governance

Abstract

This review situates A. D. Popov’s monograph Constellation of Unfading Glory: Hero Cities of Southern Russia and Soviet Memory of the Great Patriotic War within the Russian field of memory studies, where attention has shifted from narratology to the analysis of memory infrastructures — material, ritual, and legal. Popov productively localizes the late-Soviet “war canon” at the level of hero cities (Sevastopol, Stalingrad / Volgograd, Kerch, Novorossiisk), tracing the interplay of monumental ensembles, ritual repertoires, school-museum practices, and a personalized “pantheon”. The book’s key conceptual move is the notion of a “memorial order”, which captures the stability of canon as a negotiated outcome between top-down policy and bottom-up initiatives. The review, however, identifies several tensions: a misalignment between chronology and geography (a Soviet-period focus versus a corpus defined by today’s political map), an under-theorized status of the “city as a collective subject of memory”, the predominance of top-down optics over micro-sociologies of appropriation, and limited operationalization of core concepts. It proposes avenues for extension: a broader comparative frame beyond the selected constellation, post-Soviet legal-educational dynamics, cartographies of counter-memory (including deportation traumas), and metrics for the “economies of commemoration”. In this enlarged horizon, Popov’s study operates as a carefully assembled map and a starting model for transferable tools to analyze urban heroization and memory infrastructures.