Victory in the Second World War is perceived in contemporary Russia as a memory serving to cohere society and inspire patriotic pride. For memory of so complex and contradictory series of events to serve a political function in the present, historians and cultural producers have had to organise representations of the war into a coherent narrative. This required emphasising some elements of the war experience and marginalising or even forgetting others.
Focusing on documentary film as a key facet of a wider system of representations of history, this talk will examine two dimensions of this process in detail: newsreel representations of civilian victims of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, including Jews, on the one hand, as an example of marginalised experience, and on the other hand, the representation of the battle of Berlin, the moment of triumph, a key and much promoted element of the war narrative. In both cases, by comparing publically released often repeated ‘iconic’ images with those discarded and left in the archive, we can see how the uplifting memory of Victory in the Great Patriotic War was constructed and manipulated for political purposes in ways that still resonate in Russian society.