89 8 5 THE SOVIET WAR MEMORIAL IN VIENNA Geopolitics of memory and the new Russian diaspora in post-Cold War Europe Tatiana Zhurzhenko If you happen to be one of the thousands of tourists visiting the beautiful Austrian capital in late spring, you will most probably be drawn to the open-air symphony concert at Heldenplatz (Heroes’ Square) on 8 May. Inaugurated in 2013, this new mode of celebrating the end of the Second World War entices both locals and visi- tors to participate in a big picnic party at the very heart of Vienna. A Russian tourist, however, may well find herself at a very different party the next day, 9 May, just sev- eral hundred metres away, around the Soviet war memorial at Schwarzenbergplatz. This is a Victory Day celebration which once a year draws numerous Russians and Russian speakers to a public performative commemoration of the Great Patriotic War which has been at the core of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian identity. This ‘invented tradition’ is also rather new, as is the Viennese Russian community itself, which is a product of post-Soviet migration. Neither mass performance refers to the other, thereby strengthening the impression that there is practically no dialogue between these two parallel cultures of memory – Austrian and Russian – coex- isting in Vienna’s urban space. The Austrians and foreign tourists who gather on Heldenplatz on 8 May and those Russians and people from other former Soviet republics who come to the Soviet war memorial the next morning are two differ- ent crowds – it is difficult to believe that these two celebrations are dedicated to the end of the same war. This simple observation on the duality of memory of the Second World War in Vienna can serve as the starting point for a discussion of several questions cen- tral to this chapter: what happened to Soviet memory of the Great Patriotic War after the end of the Cold War era when the old geopolitical order in Europe col- lapsed, burying Stalin’s ‘empire of memory’ under its ruins? How has the role of Soviet war memorials outside Russia changed since 1991 and, in particular, with Moscow’s growing ambition to return to the league of great powers and to influ- ence European politics? How did the affirmative commemorative politics of the