Abstract
This chapter explores the shifting evolution and public negotiation of the meaning of Belarusian war memory, through a study of two post-Soviet memorials in Belarus: the Island of Tears, a memorial to the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), officially opened in central Minsk in 1996, and the Stalin Line, a memorial to the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), opened on the western outskirts of Minsk in 2006. This analysis traces the multiple ways in which these two memorials connect and reconstitute the memories of these two wars in new and sometimes unexpected ways, both transforming existing post-Soviet narrative elements and combining them with newly invented visions of the past as a means of updating the Soviet legacy to fit the current context.
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Ackermann, F. (2017). Successors to the Great Victory: Afghan Veterans in Post-Soviet Belarus. In: Fedor, J., Kangaspuro, M., Lassila, J., Zhurzhenko, T. (eds) War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus . Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66523-8_8
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