The Immortal Regiment and its glocalisation: Reformatting Victory Day in Bulgaria

Setting the scene: Two competing celebrations

For decades, 9 May has been celebrated in Bulgaria as Victory Day following the Soviet commemorative calendar. Since Bulgaria’s EU membership (2007) it has also been marked as the Day of Europe. The two celebrations take place at different sites and times, target different audiences and do not refer to each other. The Day of Europe engages mostly young people, offering events in the ‘infotainment’ mode. The main initiatives come from the Representations Office of the European Commission and the Information Bureau of the European Parliament. Bulgarian official bodies, NGOs, universities and schools hold their own events to mark the day.

Victory Day has a rather fixed format, inherited from the communist period. The main event is a commemoration in front of the monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia. The official celebrations before 1990 included ceremonies attended by high-ranking military and communist-party figures. The aura of sacredness was also due to historical reasons: the liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman domination came as a result of the Russian-Ottoman war in 1877–1878. Since then, Russia has been celebrated as liberator – a theme prominent in Bulgarian cultural memory (commemorative calendar, monumental art, symbolic topography). It was therefore easy for the communist regime to forge a myth of the ‘double liberator’. Thus, due to both historical memory and propaganda efforts, the invasion of the Soviet Army in September 1944 was generally not interpreted as occupation, in contrast to the prevailing attitudes in the Baltic and Central-European countries. These interpretations, sustained by a powerful ideological apparatus, ensured that the Soviet Army, the Soviet Union and the Bulgarian-Soviet friendship were the core of 9-May celebrations. Recent historical analyses have offered alternative perspectives, and common sentiments have undergone dramatic diversification, but – again unlike other Central- and East-European countries – the alternatives to the Soviet-era narrative have not garnered full consensus.

Since 1990, Victory Day has lost its official character and has been appropriated by the political left, represented by the Bulgarian Socialist (ex-communist) Party (BSP) and its satellite NGOs. They have organised the annual celebrations for the past decades following their own agenda. One reason for the easy political appropriation of Victory Day is that compared to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – countries that suffered enormous losses of soldiers and civilians – 9 May did not have such a deep and traumatic meaning for individuals and families in Bulgaria. Staged as a formal expression of friendship with the Soviet Union, it could not touch on individual sensitivities with any comparable depth or intensity.

I have done ethnography of Victory Day since 2013 (Koleva, 2015). That year, the event was geared to the upcoming elections. Most of c. 300 participants were elderly people – BSP members and sympathisers who came to support their party. Some had biographical ties with Russia/Soviet Union (work, study, marriage). Since 2014, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, the role of the Russian Cultural centre and the Russian diaspora has become more visible than before.

The competing celebrations exemplify wider European memory battles around WWII, especially on the responsibility for triggering the war and the contribution to the Allies’ victory. After the EU accession of the ex-communist countries, the European memory narrative, hitherto centred on the Holocaust and anti-fascism, was challenged to acknowledge the Eastern Europeans’ experience of another type of totalitarianism. The Resolutions of the European Parliament on the 60th anniversary of the Second World War (2005), and on European Conscience and Totalitarianism (2009) officially, albeit cautiously, launched a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism contesting the mnemopolicies of the Russian Federation. ¹ The answer was an activation of its mnemonic diplomacy. ² The ‘Russification’ of the 9-May celebration in Bulgaria apparently follows the dynamics of this larger-scale geopolitics of memory. I shall try to show the specificity of the Bulgarian case by exploring a change in the format of the 9-May celebration – a trans-border initiative, called the Immortal Regiment (IR). It started in 2012 and quickly spread in Russia and among the Russian diaspora. What I have found intriguing is that only in Bulgaria, a ‘clone’ of the IR was registered: an NGO with the same aims and statute as the Russian original. Indeed, there is an eponymous foundation in Serbia, but its aims, symbols and activities are different, acquiring at times nationalist overtones. ³

I have followed the activities of the Bulgarian IR since its inception in 2016: mainly the annual marches, their organisation and media coverage, but also its online presence. I aim at a deeper understanding of this commemorative genre and the changes it has undergone when adopted transnationally. My hypothesis is that the success of the movement is due to its vernacularisation strategy: it has mobilised family memory to re-invigorate the increasingly formalised WWII commemorations. This ‘travel’ across official and vernacular memory has had a certain unifying and solidarity-building effect in Russia, but not in Bulgaria.

Following Erll’s model outlined above, I shall start with a brief account of the original movement and its transnational expansion; then I will focus on its Bulgarian ‘clone’ to look in greater detail into the changes resulting from the ‘travel’ of this memory practice across geographical, national and political borders.

The Immortal Regiment in Russia: Claiming Victory Day

Having started as a local initiative, the IR was registered in 2014 as a ‘historical-patriotic movement’ with a mission to safeguard and transmit personal and family memory of WWII, steering away from political, commercial or PR tasks. It has a loose non-hierarchical structure with its main activities locally based and organised by volunteer coordinators. In a situation of diminishing participation of veterans, seen as a direct and ‘authentic’ link to the war past, the movement has sought to re-invigorate the celebration of Victory Day by encouraging people to (1) bring to the parade a poster with the photo of a predecessor who took part in the war as soldier, sailor, guerrilla fighter, worker at the home front, prisoner of war or besieged (‘blokadnik’), and (2) tell his/her story on the website. The inclusiveness of the list of war participants is noteworthy: it extends the categories of persons to be commemorated beyond the usual notion of war veterans. ‘The Regiment – it is the millions of people gone and their descendants’, the Statute proclaims. ⁴

The ‘victory’ of the Immortal Regiment and its costs

Already in 2013 the IR commemorative model was adopted in other countries, to include 90 countries in 2019. ⁸ The participants in the marches are predominantly Russian expatriates. ⁹ The spread of the movement abroad relied on local coordinators in each country, supported by the Coordination Council of Russian Compatriots, under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. Its mission is the consolidation of the ‘Russian World’, that is the Russian ethnic-cultural space. ¹⁰ The database on the website acquired global dimensions too, covering over 50 countries, some of which were not involved in WWII. Thus, the geographical scope of the database obviously reflects the geography of present-day Russian diaspora, rather than WWII itineraries. For Bulgaria, 39 populated places are listed, including all regional centres and a few localities on the Black Sea coast where Russian citizens reside on a permanent or seasonal basis. ¹¹ However, for some of these, there is no evidence of any activities.

Spreading globally, the IR was integrated into Russian cultural diplomacy ¹² to become an asset to its ‘soft power’, that is a way to promote its agenda using the resources of art and culture, history, media and communication technologies. Thereby, the carrier group transcended the limits of family and local communities towards an ethno-national scale, adopting a different agenda. From another perspective, the spread of the IR to countries where Soviet soldiers did not set foot during WWII, highlights the fluid boundaries between the local/regional and the global in the field of memory.

Meanwhile, the IR movement has drawn considerable research attention. The most frequent questions tackle its political uses. It is viewed ‘simultaneously as a state-sponsored project deeply intertwined with official policies towards historical memory and as the collective representation of local, bottom-up commemorative initiatives’ (Nemtsev, 2019: 1). While this hybridity ¹³ may well account for its huge popularity, it has caused trouble to analysts. Arguments vary from appraisals of IR’s democratic nature and (potential) subversive power to criticism of its colonisation by the establishment. Some authors have noted that for Russians, the memory of WWII has never been reduced to the official narrative; it has been very personal and intimate. Consequently, IR is interpreted as citizens’ protest against the monopolisation of war memory by the state. It ‘talked about the war in a different way and in fact subverted the state monopoly on the interpretation of the war past’ (Kurilla, 2018: 8) stressing that WWII was also about loss and mourning. Acknowledging this message, critics have pointed out that the IR march de-valorises individual tragedies by turning them into mass spectacle (Nemtsev, 2019).

But why is the IR march so easily permeable to politicisation? Family memory is a kind of vernacular/communicative memory, which is not politically articulate. Privileging it and striving to keep it apolitical has ironically led to a lack of reflexivity regarding its political dimensions. ¹⁴ As a result, official and vernacular memories have turned out to be surprisingly congenial to each other. The mnemonic narrative forged by the IR has lent itself to an easy identification with the Soviet historiographical narrative, challenged in the 1990s and re-installed after Putin’s advent to power – namely the discursive isolation of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) from the Soviet Union’s overall participation in WWII (esp. the cooperation with Nazi Germany in 1939–1941). Moreover, some slogans of the last years (‘To Berlin’, ‘We can do it again’) are explicitly aggressive and anti-European. ¹⁵

Gabowitsch (2018) has explored the subversive potential of ‘flat’, that is non-hierarchical de-centralised movements, among them the IR. His conclusion is that although such movements are flexible and democratic, allowing participants to decide on their degree and manner of involvement, they are vulnerable in the Russian context. While the initial impulse behind IR was apparently critical, only a couple of years later the movement came to be seen as hegemonic, reflecting the constellation of power in nowadays Russia. Its appropriation by the state diluted whatever subversive messages it might have had (Gabowitsch, 2018: 310). ¹⁶ As a result, the very participation in the marches – in spite of the tensions between official and vernacular interests – can be seen as support for the regime.

While this conclusion is quite convincing, it must be noted that critics have limited their observations to the march, disregarding the archive. Certainly the former, with its spectacular scale and performative intensity, is well worth the attention it has received. The latter however – like similar user-generated archiving and commemorative initiatives on the web – has a horizontal structure and a ‘miscellaneous’ quality subverting the power of selection, classification and hierarchisation inbuilt into institutional archiving practices. This does not make it immune to reproducing the hegemonic discourse (see Bernstein, 2016). Still, with its modular structure and its focus on family genealogy, it articulates and supports vernacular (small-scale, concrete and personalised) remembrance, which seems to be ‘talking past’ manipulative intentions. The march ‘sutures’ diverse experiences, memories and myth-histories in a common emotional tissue (Oushakine, 2013), which fuses commemoration of the dead and solidarity with the living. Without such exuberance, but in a no less engaging way, the database offers a space for collaborative ‘memory work’ which moves from the public recognition of family intimacy towards a kind of public intimacy – a direction of the memory ‘travel’ that I call vernacularisation.

The IR march and its export can be viewed as a way of wielding neo-imperial soft power through the community of Russian compatriots, especially in the neighbouring countries (Braun, 2015). While this is also true for Bulgaria, I would like to consider the case from another perspective – that of a possible glocalisation, with its intended and unintended consequences.

The Bulgarian Immortal Regiment: What is in a copycat?

Bulgaria’s experience of WWII was complicated and not easily lending itself to linear commemorative interpretations. After an initial period of neutrality Bulgaria joined the Axis in March 1941 to change sides in early September 1944. Thereafter, the Bulgarian Army participated in military actions on the side of the Allies. Over 8000 soldiers fell in battle, over 9000 disappeared. However, these losses remained marginal in the historical narrative and commemorative politics of the communist regime, focused exclusively on the underground resistance in 1941–1944 and greatly exaggerating its scope and importance. This focus was clearly visible in the memorial landscape of communist Bulgaria (Kelleher, 2009). While hundreds of monuments to the Soviet Army, to the partisans and their helpers were installed (many of them still in place), there was no central memorial to army ranks. The apparent explanation of this ‘asymmetry’ in the public memory is the effort of the regime to inculcate certain ideas of the past, ensuring its own legitimacy. ¹⁷ Consequently, in contrast to other countries, there were no public commemorative practices to support private mourning for the war dead. Thus the Bulgarian Immortal Regiment – though a precise ‘copycat’ of the Russian one – was established in different circumstances, by different agents and with different messages. While adopting the statute and symbols of the Russian grassroots initiative (the original IR), it has a clear political identity: the founder and chairman of the IR Foundation is also head of the anti-NATO and anti-EU Union of the Communists in Bulgaria (est. 1995), and former head (2000–2013) of the Che-Guevara movement – organisations identifying themselves as ‘radical Left’. Other major mnemonic actors are pro-Russian NGOs, BSP and some nationalist constituencies. The political instrumentalisation of the march is clearly seen in its media coverage as well. ¹⁸

The chronicle: hierarchies of remembrance

Closely following the format of the Russian IR, the Bulgarian one also supports a database. Unlike the Russian original, where users have direct access to upload their stories, photos and documents, the Bulgarian site asks users to send materials to the admin. A comparison between the Russian IR chronicle – region Bulgaria, and the Bulgarian IR chronicle reveals further differences.

Firstly, the Russian database for Bulgaria is organised by populated place, evoking the idea of shared locality and collective/local memory. The authors are obviously members of transnational families who thus link to their parent’s country of origin. Kinship ties are usually specified, while genres vary from detailed and personal stories to brief biographical accounts. In the Bulgarian database, the entries are predominantly encyclopaedia-style (place and date of birth, occupation, date and cause of death). ²¹ In over 100 cases, the authors are anonymous, and so remain the persons meant to be immortalised: there are no photos or personal documents, while communist-propaganda clichés abound (‘killed by the fascist capitalists’, ‘inquisitioned by the police’). The dates of upload testify to a campaign for filling in the database in mid-April 2016 when some 50 names beginning with ‘A’ were entered in alphabetical order. The Bulgarian IR site seems to have been planned as a memorial, rather than a space for active family remembrance. The ‘Search’ functionality, instrumental in the Russian case, is lacking in the Bulgarian version.

Next, as seen in the Table 1, the comparison demonstrates different conceptions of who should be remembered and for what. While army soldiers predominate in the Russian database, for the Bulgarian one partisans and their helpers comprise the largest category. This hierarchy, where the antifascist underground comes first, reproduces the communist official memory, highlighting only the communist-led resistance, whether or not related to WWII. For instance, an entry honours the organiser of a terrorist act in Sofia on 16 April 1925, where over 130 were killed and 500 injured. Thus the database faithfully follows the communist-antifascist mnemonic template ignoring whatever does not fit: there is no room for non-communist anti-fascism, for example parliamentary opposition, and the army – the core of the Russian database – is largely glossed over. Against this backdrop it should be noted however, that the entries about army soldiers are the ones most closely following the Russian model: most of them authored by descendants, accompanied with photos and including some personal remarks. Again, it can be hypothesised that the Russian archive privileging family memory, has served as a model.

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Table 1.

Comparison of the databases of the Russian IR (region Bulgaria) and the Bulgarian IR.

Categories	Russian IR site – region Bulgaria 22	Bulgarian IR site 23
BG army soldiers	5	42
Partisans and helpers	5	94
Political detainees 1941–1944	1	15
Earlier period	0	16
No data	11	0
Soviet army and rear	102	14
Total	124	181

Do the two regiments belong to the same army?

The pragmatic perspective, to which I subscribe here – viewing memory as a situated practice rather than an ‘artefact’ – draws the attention to the performative aspects of meaning-making: what people say and do can be regarded not only in terms of symbols and meanings, but also ‘as actions which produce affects and effects in the world’ (Rigney, 2016: 68). The comparison of the two cases along the dimensions of carriers/agents, media, forms and content/messages, helps to understand not only how social, cultural and political contexts shape commemorative practices but also how affective and material settings mediate their meanings. While the mnemonic practices are the same, and the ritual grammars, that is rules of symbolic coding and communication, are similar, a number of significant changes have occurred as a result of the IR’s ‘travel’ across borders and (political) cultures.

As far as the practices are concerned, a vernacularisation of public/official memory is observed in both cases. In terms of Assmanns’ dichotomy, communicative memory ha splashed back onto cultural memory. The appealing intimacy of family remembrance, combined with the crowdsourcing approach, has kindled agency and a sense of ownership. Participants in the IR marches are protagonists, not mere spectators. As Oushakine (2013) has demonstrated, such an enactive remembering relies on an emotional relation to the past based on the activation of de-contextualised symbols and tropes. In both cases, the ‘affective management of history’ does not offer a cognitive, intellectual perspective on the past, but rather a more personal and deeply felt one, shared within a community it strives to unite. Vernacular reminiscences have given new life to what has increasingly been growing into an empty ritual shell; people have filled it with their own stories and meanings, and have done so actively. No wonder that the filling has included a wealth of mass/pop-cultural elements: St.-George’s ribbons, military accessories, dressing up, etc. ²⁴ As a consequence, contentious messages – nationalist, Stalinist, separatist, anti-European – have acquired a benign consumerist gloss.

The outlined differences in the commemorative agendas have led to changes not only in the forms but also in the content/messages. While in both cases the initiative relies on emotional commitment, in Russia it is motivated by a desire to bracket out differences, and in Bulgaria – to reaffirm and reinforce them. While the Russian Regiment has focused on individual symbolic and bodily activity and has sought distinctly apolitical symbols, the Bulgarian is rather hybrid, including characteristics of an organised political performance. While in the Russian case family solidarity has played (initially, at least) a leading role, due to the intergenerational transfer of family memory, in Bulgaria there is a clear identification with a politically defined culture of memory. In the former case the carrier community is designed to involve generations in the family, while in the latter case these are largely political generations. If for the Russian IR, especially after its spread across borders, this community may be coterminous with the nation, in the Bulgarian case it is rather limited and exclusive in its oppositional situatedness.

Evidently, a comparison of the two cases is complicated by their respective dynamics, which necessitates a modification of the starting hypothesis. In Russia, the IR march initially set aside hegemonic meanings to engage with loss – an underplayed aspect of the war in public, but one kept in family memory. As Winter (2010: 323) has noted, ‘[p]ublic commemoration lasts when it draws out overlaps between national history and family history’. Reconnecting with earlier generations in the family is an integral part of the IR as a commemorative practice with high affective intensity, which certainly accounts for its wide appeal, with or without a subversive potential. With its appropriation by the authorities and its ‘globalisation’, the IR’s content seems to have undergone a metamorphosis into a kind of ‘performative patriotism’ (Arkhipova et al., 2017: 100), similar to the normative version of WWII history coined by Soviet historiography and re-established in the 2000s. Thus the IR has effectively re-invigorated what Tumarkin (2003) has called ‘a cult of the Great Patriotic War’.

In Bulgaria, the memory politics in relation to WWII can be described as recall-induced forgetting, where ‘in conjunction with what is said, silence impairs some memories over others’. (Stone and Hirst, 2014: 322). It is this situation that accounts for the change of the agents and messages of the commemorative practice while preserving its form. The Bulgarian IR has endorsed the inherited communist narrative without much creativity. The ritual was reclaimed not by family memory but rather, by a political (and partly generational) constituency. Thereby, unlike the Russian original, its message is divisive in the present Bulgarian context. On the other hand, while in Russia the establishment has been quick in appropriating the initiative, in Bulgaria the state has largely withdrawn from instrumentalisation of festivities for political control. ²⁵ The newly emerging social and semantic structures have overlapped with the old ones rather than replacing them. The situation of mnemonic pluralism and fragmentation has lent a new meaning and a sense of ownership to what looked very much like a hollow ritual. The celebratory ‘competition’ that juxtaposed the Day of Europe to Victory Day has re-invigorated the latter. To limit myself to one example, the theme of the ‘hijacked holiday’ re-appears in social media every year: some users, ignoring or unaware of Schuman’s declaration of 9 May 1950, see in the Day of Europe a purposeful attempt to eclipse Victory Day. ²⁶ Thus Victory Day is positioned as a counter-celebration to the Day of Europe. ²⁷ The competitive striving for recognition has led to its reinvention through challenging the other narrative: our holiday runs counter to your holiday. The idea is not only to remember but to remember in a particular way, to demonstrate a cohesion around a version of the past: not ‘let’s remember how it was’ but ‘let’s show how we remember’ (Arkhipova et al., 2017: 90). In Bulgaria, this kind of mnemonic solidarity has reproduced the controversies set by political elites and experienced by significant parts of the population. This is why pro-Kremlin political actors invariably strive to capitalise on the celebration – a tendency noticed also in the 1990s Russia (Zorin, 1998).

To sum up, the emergence of the IR and its subsequent ‘globalisation’ reveal an oscillation between official and vernacular memory: from the vernacularisation of the commemoration through anchoring it in family memory, to its appropriation by official memory policies. The IR’s ‘glocalisation’ in Bulgaria has meant a change of its carrier-agents and of its messages in the situation of mnemonic fragmentation and contest. Such changes may be important enough to support the glocalisation-hypothesis but they do not exhaust the subject. Victory Day refers not only to the celebrated event. As Gabowitsch (2015) has noted, it ‘becomes a statement in a dialogue of previous iterations of the celebration’. Indeed, Bakhtin’s (1983) concepts of social heteroglossia and dialogue offer a way to make sense of some more subtle aspects of the IR’s ‘glocalisation’ in Bulgaria. Due to its loose, individualised and non-hierarchical mode of participation, it has offered a space for heteroglossic agendas. This situation has made it possible to activate a community of passive remembrance and to articulate previously silenced memories – those of the Bulgarian army soldiers who perished in WWII and were only privately remembered. While heroes of the resistance form the core of the ‘immortal crew’, the memory of the fallen soldiers has also gained some ground as family, that is communicative, memory, not as a political or national one. This emancipation of family memory has become possible within the ritual grammar borrowed from the Russian original. Thus, as a by-product, the import of a mnemonic practice has strengthened a (sub)culture of memory previously screened out by the exaggerated narrative of the communist resistance. The commemorative forms established by the IR have offered a template for asserting these memories. Bringing the portraits of their predecessors who had ‘only’ been soldiers, participants in Victory Day seem to make a gesture towards a non-hegemonic memory discourse. It does not openly challenge the ‘double-liberator’ myth, but rather ‘talks past’ it. Thus, rank-and-file participants bring in their own agenda, inspired by the vernacular undercurrent of the IR rather than by its globalised content.

Victory Day in Bulgaria does not follow the mnemonic regionalisation of Europe along the Holocaust–GULag line. ²⁸ Neither does it exemplify the collision between the antifascist narrative and the revisionist politics of ‘nationalisation of suffering’ (Luthar, 2017: 197). Still, it seems to prove that sites of memory, ‘while they come into being as points where many acts of remembrance converge, only stay alive as long as people consider it worthwhile to argue about their meaning’ (Rigney, 2008: 346). Being a catalyst for WWII memories, the IR also sets limits to their articulation within its own context. Nevertheless, the democratic form of the initiative has allowed situating such memories alongside (rather than inside) the agonistic commemoration and thereby has to some extent countered its intended ideological and political content. In the Bulgarian case, the Immortal Regiment also exemplifies a ‘memory multiculture’ (Molden, 2016: 131), that is a mnemonic heteroglossia, leading to a plurality of cultures and subcultures of memory.