Great Patriotic War Memory in Sevastopol: Making Sense of Suffering in the “City of Military Glory”

Abstract

This chapter examines the central paradox of Sevastopol’s cultural memory—that though renowned for its military glory, it is in fact a city of military defeats. It explores the city’s robust commemorative apparatus and argues that the endurance of Sevastopol’s glory narrative over time can be attributed to the local population’s dynamic memory performances. These performances, which range from the didactic and dramatic, to the ceremonial and martial, center on the motif of Sevastopol’s “two defenses” and serve to perpetuate the city’s distinctive narrative cycle of devastation followed by rebirth, of suffering and defeat followed by glory. The chapter considers the commemoration of elements of Sevastopol’s war history that do not sit easily with the glory narratives, and concludes that Sevastopol’s mythology of military glory, though enduring, is ultimately limiting for the city’s past as well as its future.