Immortal Regiment

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 9th of May 2012, the Immortal Regiment marched in its modern form for the first time. The march wound through the streets of Tomsk, a city in western Siberia. More than six thousand people took part. Together, they carried more than two thousand photographs of relatives who had fought in the Second World War. The idea had come from three journalists. They had noticed something troubling: each year, fewer veterans were surviving to march on Victory Day themselves. Within three years, what they had started in one Siberian city had spread to 1,150 settlements across 17 countries. Within four years, it had reached 42 countries. How did a single column of mourners in Tomsk become one of the most widely observed civic rituals on the planet? And what does it mean when a movement built to honor ordinary people becomes a contested political symbol? Even some of its founders have publicly criticized what it has become.

• 2. Before the Name Appeared

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  Soviet casualties from the 1941-45 Great Patriotic War numbered roughly 20 million people; by the latest Russian estimates, the toll reaches 27 million. Either figure represents a third of all World War Two casualties worldwide. The full demographic loss was even greater. The conflict included many of the most lethal battle operations in human history. Victory Day was commemorated each year throughout the USSR and in the satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The war saturated cinema, literature, school lessons, mass media, and the arts long after the fighting ended.

  In 1965, students from Novosibirsk school number 121 walked through the city carrying photographs of war participants. It was the earliest documented example of such a march, held to mark the 20th anniversary of victory. In 1981, in the Rostov Oblast, mothers dressed in black robes carried portraits of their dead sons. They walked through the Square of the Fighters of the Revolution. The idea belonged to a director named Yulia Sinelnikova. By 1999, citizens in Jerusalem were taking soldiers' portraits into the streets on Victory Day. In 2007, Gennady Ivanov, Chairman of the Council of Veterans of the Tyumen Region, organized a march he called the "Parade of Victors." Participants carried portraits of front-line relatives along the main Tyumen street. None of these marches were connected to each other. The task of bringing them under a single named movement would fall to three journalists in Tomsk.

• 3. Born in Tomsk

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  Sergey Lapenkov, Sergey Kolotovkin, and Igor Dmitriev gave the Immortal Regiment its name and its modern structure. Each had noticed the same thing in 2011: the Victory Day processions in Russian cities were becoming processions of the living alone. Veterans were disappearing from the marching columns.

  Their response was to build an organization and hold a rally in Tomsk on the 9th of May 2012. They called it the Immortal Regiment. The idea was clear: if veterans were no longer there to march themselves, their relatives would march in their place, carrying photographs. The following December, representatives from more than 15 Russian cities expressed interest in organizing their own marches. By February 2013, the number had grown to 30 cities, and the movement had crossed into four countries: Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Israel.

  By 2015, that network of coordinators had grown large enough to approach the Kremlin itself. Organizers sent a formal request to the President of the Russian Federation, asking permission to march on Red Square.

• 4. The State Joins

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  By 2015, the Immortal Regiment had received national status in Russia, and Vladimir Putin had become its most visible participant. Since that year, Putin and senior Russian officials have marched in the Moscow procession.

  The 2015 Red Square march required formal approval. Moscow organizers filed the request on behalf of three public organizations. These were the Immortal Regiment - Moscow, the All-Russian Popular Front, and the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation. On the 9th of May 2015, the procession stepped onto Red Square for the first time. It came immediately after the Moscow Victory Day Parade, which marked the 70th anniversary of victory.

  More than 150 thousand people had expressed their intention to walk. According to the Moscow Police, more than 50 thousand actually took part. The column moved from Belorusskaya Square to the Kremlin, concluding on Moskvoretskaya Embankment. The state budget contributed about 7,000,000 Russian rubles to the event.

  Putin marched that day carrying a portrait of his father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin. The front banner of the procession bore the words Bessmertniy Polk. Washington D.C., Berlin, Tashkent, and Yekaterinburg were among the other cities that hosted the march that same year.

• 5. Across Borders

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  Armenia hosted its first Immortal Regiment procession in 2016, organized jointly by the Armenian Immortal Regiment NGO and the Ministry of Defense. Each year the march begins at the statue of composer Aram Khachaturian in Yerevan. It honors those who served in the Second World War alongside those who fell in the first Artsakh War and the 2016 Nagorno-Karabakh clashes.

  In Latvia, the government does not officially recognize the 9th of May. The large Russian community there held its own procession, gathering near the Red Army monument in Riga, a monument that has since been demolished.

  From 2012 to 2014, Ukrainian cities held Immortal Regiment marches, but they were frequently disrupted. Nationalists carrying flags of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian Insurgent Army interrupted the processions. Following Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, joining the march in Ukraine came to be read as a statement in support of Russian foreign policy. The event is now largely associated with pro-Russian groups in the country.

  In Belarus, the nongovernmental Immortal Regiment procession has faced sustained opposition from President Alexander Lukashenko's government. The government has worked to give its own official events precedence on Victory Day.

  In 2017, Tajik authorities cancelled the Immortal Regiment march over security concerns. They also cited what they described as Islamic traditions that do not approve of the public display of pictures of deceased people.

  In 2020, Turkmenistan held its march at the Joint Turkmen-Russian Secondary School. A parallel ceremony took place in front of the Halk Hakydasy Memorial Complex in the capital, Ashgabat. The procession was led by a cadet of the Berdimuhamed Annayev 1st Specialized Military School. He carried a portrait of Berdinuhamed Annayev, the grandfather of President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow.

  In Israel, marches are held in cities with large populations of Red Army veterans and their descendants. The Israeli Immortal Regiment organization operates as a nonprofit, non-political body. Benjamin Netanyahu has participated in the march, carrying a portrait of Wolf Vilenski, a Hero of the Soviet Union who died in Israel in 1992.

  In the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, established by Russian-backed separatists, the 2022 Immortal Regiment event was temporarily relocated to the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol.

• 6. Contested Ground

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  Igor Dmitriev, one of the three journalists who founded the Immortal Regiment in 2012, has publicly questioned what the movement has become. His concern, shared by other critics, is that the procession has shifted from honoring the war dead to serving government policy interests. A separate charge holds that many participants carry photographs they have no connection to and discard them after the event.

  In the late summer and autumn of 2018, left-wing groups organized counter-marches they called the "Shameful Regiment." Participants carried photographs of prominent political figures who had publicly supported raising the retirement age. The marches were part of the broader 2018 Russian pension protests.

  In 2020, President Putin announced the cancellation of the march in a video conference with Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu. He explained that "it is impossible to observe any distance by definition." Plans to hold the march later, on Navy Day, were ultimately scrapped. The event was postponed to 2021. On the 9th of May 2020, a substitute took its place: an online webcast carried across more than 200 media screens throughout Moscow. It was viewed more than 20 million times. Nothing quite like it had been attempted before.

  In 2023, the march was cancelled under the stated pretext of security concerns. The suspicion was that organizers feared participants would carry portraits of those killed in the Russo-Ukrainian war. That might have transformed the commemoration into a site of anti-war protest. Organizers suggested alternative formats: portraits placed on car windshields, or worn as badges. On the 19th of April 2024, Sergey Aksyonov announced the cancellation of the march in Crimea. Aksyonov, the Head of the Republic of Crimea, cited security reasons. Four days later, Elena Tsunaeva, a member of the Immortal Regiment's organizational committee, confirmed that Russia had decided to cancel the march nationwide.

  In Serbia, President Aleksandar Vucic has participated in the march each year, carrying a portrait of his grandfather, Andjelko Vucic.