Commemorating and contesting a dominant space order Memory wars between Ukraine and Russia at the Noyers-Saint-Martin Soviet cemetery (France)

This article examines how commemoration - as a performance located in a singular place shapes a dominant spatial order, reflecting and reproducing relations of power, and to what extent this order can be contested. It is based on a participant observation of the World War II commemorations in the Soviet cemetery of Noyers-Saint-Martin (Oise, France), supplemented by interviews with various people involved in the ceremony, the analysis of archive and other textual documents. The article shows that, during the 2000's, Russian actors have succeeded in creating in Noyers-Saint-Martin a spatial order based on the preeminence of Russia over the other post-soviet republics and the diffusion of the Great Patriotic War myth, which is part of a "memorial soft power" strategy directed abroad by Russian authorities. However, since 2014, the moment of the ceremony is being used by Ukrainian actors to challenge this spatial order at the micro-local scale, to promote alternative memories of the Second World War and, further, to unveil the current destabilization of Ukraine by Russia in Donbass and Crimea. Nevertheless, the significance of this contestation is limited, because in the larger French political and commemorative space, Russian actors have more resources and dominant positions than Ukrainian ones. Unlike all-encompassing approaches, often assimilating commemoration and politics of memory, the article argues for an ethnographic approach of commemoration, giving weight to a detailed analysis of the spatiality of bodies and artifacts at the time of the ceremony.