Rightist Ritual, Memory and Identity Commemoration in Late Imperial Russia

This article explores how Russia’s right-wing groups drew upon concepts of memory and identity commemoration to inform their ritual practices. Their creation of various memorials, celebrations and cults represented a synthesis between conservative values of Orthodoxy, autocracy and Russian nationality, and a populist nationalist appeal that came to define the ideology and practice of the Russian ultra-right in the final years of tsarism. The analysis includes three different case studies. First, it explores the creation of a leadership cult amongst the radical right, assessing how followers celebrated the memory of the leader of the Russian Monarchist Party, Vladimir Gringmut, after 1907. Second, it analyses the activity of one of the most militant groups on the Russian far right, the Union of Russian People, in Ukraine during 1905–07. Finally, it considers the activity of the Union of the Arkhangel Mikhail in Bessarabia and their staging of commemorative activities in celebration of the centenary of Bessarabia’s incorporation into the Russian Empire, held in 1912. All of these examples demonstrate how an illiberal, populist monarchism was developing away from the Russian state and even in conflict with it.