Where the Bodies Are Buried

Everything Everywhere All at Once;

or, Geography, Blood, Culture

We all resemble travelers.... In our own houses we seem to be guests, in our families we look like strangers, in our cities we look like nomads..

Pyotr Chaadaev, '

First Philosophical Letter" (1829)

"My address

Is not a house or a street.

My address is

The Soviet Union."

 Vladimir Kharitonov

"Our Home is Russia"

--Political Party in the 1990s

"He probably figured Sasha was just one of those Black Russians, the way Marina's neighbors from the Palisades assumed Ukraine was  full of Mexicans, asking Marina what language Mexicans spoke in Donetsk"

--Anya Ulinich, Petropolis (2007).

Where the Bodies Are Buried

In October 2022, as Russian occupying forces began to face the reality of their imminent loss of Kherson, a Ukrainian city they had controlled since March, they did what most retreating armies do: gathered up whatever valuable or strategic items they did not wish to surrender.  Among them was a collection of human bones.

These bones belonged to Prince Grigory Potemkin, an 18th-century statesman, military leader, and lover of Catherine the Great.  The mastermind behind the Russian Empire's (first) annexation of Crimea and the architect of the expansion of the region then known as "Novorossiya" ("New Russia"), Potemkin had been buried in the city whose incorporation into the Empire was one of his greatest accomplishments. This was not the first time his remains had been disturbed, and, given the history of both the region and the Prince himself, it may not be the last.  

Don't look at me without my skin—I’m hideous!

Catherine the Great had decreed that Potemkin be buried in Kherson, one of the (Ukrainian) cities he founded; her son wanted Potemkin's bones crushed and scattered. Over the next two hundred years, the bones were tested and re-tested (to prove their identity), put on display, photographed, and interred again; local legend has it that his skull disappeared at some point in the twentieth century after some children used it as a soccer ball.

The decision to "rescue" Potemkin's remains from the Ukrainians who had held the city as part of their sovereign territory for over thirty years is indicative not just of the nature of Russia's war in Ukraine, but of the continued attempts to use symbolism as a proxy for identity.  In The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, Katherine Verdery analyzes the long history of meaningful corpses deployed in the service of competing national myths:

By repositioning them, restoring them to honor, expelling them, or simply drawing attention to them, their exit from one grave and descent into another mark a change in social visibilities and values, part of the larger process of postsocialist transformation.

Potemkin's clearly fits the bill, although there is a strong argument to made that, in 2022, the issue are less "postsocialist" than they are "imperial-revanchinst." Potemkin's legacy in Ukraine is complicated, in that he is both the founder of two of its important cities and the political figure who ensured that what is now Ukrainian territory would be a constituent part of the Russian Empire.  

Bringing Potemkin's bones back to the Russian Federation was, to put it mildly, an interesting choice.  After all, Potemkin is best known (perhaps erroneously) for the villages that bear his name. The popular version of the story is that, four years after Crimea's 1783 annexation, Catherine the Great, accompanied by several foreign ambassadors, took a trip to Novorossiya, with an eye towards impressing Russia's allies with its accomplishments in this recently acquired territory. Since said accomplishments were few and far between, Potemkin arranged to have facades of villages set up along Catherine's route, in order to create the false impression of thriving settlements. Since then, "Potemkin villages" have become a metaphor for any attempt to create the semblance of something real in the absence of anything tangible. By this logic, would it not have been easier for Russian troops simply to pretend that they had moved the bones without actually doing anything at all?

But Verdery points out that dead bodies function precisely because they are symbolic and material at the same time: " Most of the time, they are indisputably there, as our senses of sight, touch, and smell can confirm. As such, a body's materiality can be critical to its symbolic efficacy" (27). It is as material objects that they reinforce the symbolic value of their geographic location: "their corporeality makes them important means of localizing a claim" (27-28).  

If anything, the hasty transfer of Potemkin's bones to Russian territory reminds us of the true Potemkin Village in this particular story:  Russian-occupied Kherson itself.  As soon as the city was brought under RF control,, the local citizenry were subjected to a PR blitz that amounted to changing the city's window dressing.  The streets were decorated with billboards proclaiming, "We''ll stay here forever!" as well as images of Russian national heroes, from Pushkin to General Suvorov. "Forever" didn't last out the year.

Potemkin's bones were not the only national treasures looted by Russian forces on their way out, but their seizure sends a mixed message. On the one hand, it is consistent with the Putinist regime's assertion that Ukraine is part of Russia (and therefore all its cultural heritage is also Russian).  But on the other hand, the remains of Russian heroes can mark the territory of their internment as essentially Russian. Bringing Potemkin back to Russia proper is an admission of territorial diminishment.

It is also an inherently melancholy act, although the object of melancholy is not what it might immediately seem to be. Two centuries on, it would be difficult to argue that Russia is somehow unable to complete the process of mourning Grigory Potemkin,  Potemkin's bones are a symbolic substitution, indeed, a displacement for the true melancholia involved: the unresolved mourning for the loss of a larger, greater Russia.

Readers who might not be looking forward to an entire chapter on famous corpses can rest assured that I am using Potemkin as the beginning of an argument that will generally steer clear of cemeteries.  This particular act of wartime grave-robbing makes sense not just as part of an ongoing war between two sovereign, post-Soviet nations, but as an example of the multiple, overlapping, and often conflicting attempts to situate Russia in the aftermath of two empires, the Tsarist and the Soviet.  Though the Russian Federation that emerged out of the ruins of the USSR is still an enormous and powerful country, the borders of this new nation have proven inadequate to define what "Russia" is and how it should be understood.

Does Russia consist of any place that enough people consider to be "Russian soil"? And does having a Russian national hero such as Potemkin interred at a particular site further the claim of its Russianness? (Never mind that Ukrainians might also claim Potemkin as their own). Is Russia where Russians live now, or where Russians once lived and died (and are now buried)? Is Russia a primarily geographic entity (borders, land, soil), or does Russia consist of the community of people who define themselves as Russian?  Is the common denominator of Russianness blood, language, culture, or history? If the Russian Federation is the successor state to both the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, what does that say about the Russians outside of the RF who live on former Soviet or Imperial territory?

Next: The Russia We Have Lost