1In War Monuments, Public Patriotism, and Bereavement in Russia, historian Aaron Cohen embarks on the ambitious task of analyzing Russian war monuments both in Russia and abroad from Russo-Japanese War into the Putin-era. He examines the historical circumstances that led to the rise, fall, and revival of war monuments in Russia, noting those that set the nation apart from European nations. He devotes the majority of the monograph to monuments to the world wars and the Civil War, as he notes that these conflicts impacted people most directly during the period covered in the book. He aims to contrast war as a site of memory and as a direct experience (xxviii).

2Cohen transgresses disciplinary lines and combines methodological approaches while analyzing a variety of source material. He employs a structuralist approach with quantitative data collection gathered from archives, newspapers, and public opinion surveys. While noting that academic treatments of monuments usually approach them as representations and symbols of collective memory, or in Pierre Nora’s words “sites of memory”, Cohen is more concerned with war monuments as objects and less about sites of memory. He both interprets the shapes and contexts of these monuments and considers some monuments in depth as case studies. He delineates war monuments from war memorials. Although he argues that monuments allow those with power to control public space, He contrasts them with other genres of propaganda because of the permanency incarnate in their materiality and thoroughly discusses their functions within borderlands between “professional domains and social milieus” (xxi). While he largely limits his discussion to Russian memorial culture, he discusses the role of monuments in today’s conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

3Cohen organizes the book chronologically, although his third and fourth chapters overlap. The first chapter “Honors and Insults: War Monuments in Late Imperial Russia, 1905-1914” covers the period of the Russo-Japanese war through the beginning of the First World War. He addresses tensions between groups, the financial toll and objectives of statue distribution, and notes that Russian statue dedications fit within European trends of the same early twentieth century period. He presents a picture of the monument landscape: subjects these statues honored and broad categories into which they fall, shapes, events commemorated, and innovations following the Russo-Japanese war. Using the equestrian statue to General Mikhail Skobelev as a case study exemplifying a military public relations campaign on the eve of the First World War, he concludes with a discussion of tensions between political and military actors and the estrangement between those erecting monuments and the general public.

4In the second chapter “Victims and Heroes: The Rise and Fall of Patriotic Memorials, 1914-1922”, Cohen discusses the trajectory of public mourning during this period and changes in objectives and circumstances that followed the Bolshevik revolution. These circumstances would lead to an absence of war monuments within Bolshevik memorial culture that set Russia apart from other nations who had experienced great losses in the First World War. He employs the failed attempt to construct a central monument to the revolution on Mars field and to illustrate a confusion in policy and variety of opinions.

5In his third chapter, “The Absence of Presence: War Monuments and Bolshevik Memorial Culture, 1922-1955”, Cohen discusses multiple factors that led to a dramatic plummet in pre-WWII monument decrees and realization. He discusses notable exceptions such as Matvei Manizer’s monument to the Civil War hero Chapaev, which encapsulates Bolshevik memorial practices. In the final section, Cohen notes the changes that the Second World War brought as the government returned to monument planning, architects proposed large-scale monuments, and individuals built small, local monuments. He explains why the Soviet Union’s greatest war memorials of this period appeared beyond the borders of the USSR.

6In chapter four, “Hope along the Marne: War Memorials in Russia Abroad, 1922-1941”, Cohen contrasts this absence in in pre-World War II Soviet Union with the situation abroad by examining memorials within Russian émigré communities. He delineates the functions of these World War I memorials within both émigré and host communities. He details several examples and discusses both the type of Russia these memorials invoked, as well as the specific types of memorial culture these memorials cultivated.

7The fifth chapter “Soviet War Memorials: People, State, and the Great Patriotic War 1955-1985” lays out the changes in Soviet memorial culture that followed Stalin’s death and led to the beginning of the widespread monument-building in memory of the Great Patriotic War. Cohen notes the involvement of various actors in war memory preservation and addresses often unsuccessful government efforts to control local initiatives. He explores a post-Stalinist shift in public spaces and the role these memorials played in military-patriotic education. After a discussion of eternal flames and tombs of unknown soldiers, he uses the Piskarevskoe memorial complex in Leningrad to illustrate changes in memory of the Second World War. He concludes by explaining the factors that lead to a failed endeavor: the construction of a national victory monument in Moscow.

8In the final chapter, “The Return of the Public: Civil Reconciliation, Politics, and War Monuments, 1986-2015”. Cohen details the state of flux in which Russian memorial culture has found itself since the glasnost years and discusses post-Soviet governmental preferences and societal pluralism. He explains how the collapse of memorial culture that accompanied the dissolution of the USSR allowed for the completion of the national Great Patriotic War memorial complex in Moscow. He analyzes recent monuments that rework émigré narratives while linking Russia to an international commemorative culture previously rejected by the USSR. He also discusses the role of the Russian Military Historical Society and the controversy that erupted when Samara commemorated fallen Czechoslovak legionnaires.

9Cohen’s thoughtful interpretation of wide variety of sources distinguishes this monograph. Thorough analysis of carefully chosen monuments exemplify the trends illustrated in his charts. While all the chapters contribute to our comprehension of Russian memory culture, the chapter on memorials abroad greatly enriches our understanding of émigré culture, values, and interactions with host communities. The book clearly delineates objectives and tensions among institutions and individuals that impacted the monument landscape. Cohen includes significant discussion and images of unrealized projects and thwarted projects throughout the book.

10With any ambitious project, the author must rely on some generalizations and one can think of numerous monuments and memorials that do not fall neatly into his trajectory. In the chapter that covers 1922-1955, Cohen combines two different periods and covers them unevenly: 27 pages for the first 19 prewar years, but only 9 for the next 14 years. The book could benefit from a longer discussion of World War II-era and Stalinist postwar periods during which many local organizations and individuals planned and /or erected memorials and monuments independent of state support.

11This well-written, thoroughly-researched book appears at a particularly significant time as Russia and Ukraine remain embroiled in conflict. Employing a wide variety of sources, both archival and published. The volume’s illustrations include graphs, charts, and images of monuments, many of them demolished. The attention to memorials abroad serves as a particularly valuable contribution to studies of émigré culture and experiences. The monograph contributes to the fields of, Russian and Soviet culture, architecture, and might appeal to those interested those studying the lasting cultural impact of the Great Patriotic War and beyond the region, to cultural memory studies in general.