Research interests:

• Soviet and post-Soviet history
• commemorative practices
• war memorials
• military cemeteries
• protest and social movements
• pragmatic sociology

Research project:

"Soviet war memorials and global networks"

Mischa Gabowitsch is working on an FWF-funded research project that investigates transnational aspects of the construction and use of memorials to Soviet soldiers who died in the Second World War. Working with partners who specialize in different national contexts, he is looking at Soviet military engineers who built monuments in Austria or Czechoslovakia in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War; at transnational patronage networks linking architects, sculptors, and military leaders; at the significance of war memorials to Soviet soldiers in countries for present-day Russian-speaking communities in countries such as Israel or Germany; and at the spread of socialist realist memorialization styles first developed in the Soviet Union to countries in the Global South and beyond.

Selected publications:

Victory Day before the Cult: War Commemoration in the USSR, 1945-65. In: David L. Hoffmann (ed.), The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. P. 64-85.

(ed.) Pamiatnik i prazdnik: etnografiia Dnia Pobedy (Monument and Celebration: An Ethnography of Victory Day, in Russian). Saint Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2020.

(ed.) Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities. Cham: Palgrave, 2017.

(ed., with Cordula Gdaniec and Ekaterina Makhotina) Kriegsgedenken als Event: Der 9. Mai 2015 im postsozialistischen Europa. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2017.

Protest in Putin's Russia. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.