Commemoration of the Great Patriotic War as a symbolic resource: peculiarities of functioning in the religious community

Abstract

The article analyses religious communities as subjects of symbolic and memory policies. The author talks about the competition for acquisition of limited symbolic resources using the example of exploitation of the Great Patriotic War commemoration by different religious communities in modern Russia. This competition leads to the symbolic transcoding of the military past, anchored in the formation of new sense models and memorial practices referring to pre-revolutionary patterns. A significant example of the pre-revolutionary memorial practices’ reconstruction is the building of the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces.

Keywords

• collective memory
• religious community
• symbolic resource
• memorial practice
• the great patriotic war