What is reenactable and why, and by whom?
Spotted this morning, a piece about a photograph of a military reenactment in St Petersburg.
The group are amateurs: they do public performances as a hobby, with period weapons and clothing. They’ve been doing them for 10 years, and are beginning to get state funding, which means they can do larger events, too, with aeroplanes, explosions and tanks.
Re-enactments are popular in Russia. It wasn’t raining at this one, but it was a cold, windy Sunday - and still thousands of people came out to watch, bringing their children along to what’s seen as a fun activity for all the family. They’re considered educational, too, although the battles are always presented in a glorious, patriotic way.
This is a re-enactment of one of the final battles of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.* It took place in 1988.
Which evoked the thoughts of that being a very recent war to reenact, my association to this phenomenon being as an Anglo-American thing and mostly about civil wars (though I think maybe people also do Vikings, Battle of Hastings, Wars of the Roses, American Revolutionary War?).
Anyway, all conflicts that you can pretty much do on the kind of terrain where they originally happened.
(I dunno: maybe there are reenactors reenacting the Little Wars of Queen V, even unto the 3 Anglo-Afghan Wars? It seems improbable. Very much doubt that the Western Front, 1914-18, is much visited, either, but for other reasons.)
Anyway, the wars in question seem objects of a certain nostalgia (or in case of US Civil War, irredentism?) which I wouldn't have thought in play about the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.
Do other countries do this?
Are there forms of reenactment that aren't about war and battles?
*Sometimes described as the Soviet Vietnam, i.e. not something to celebrate? This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2262318.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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