ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the city of Volgograd the built structure and the national traditions of mourning come into ambiguous interplay when seen from different points of view: that of the various generations of its inhabitants and visitors; that of the planners and developers who reconstructed it after the war; and that of the war memorials whose symbolic role and function have changed over time. In Roxanne Mountford's article on the gender dimensions of church architecture, the rhetorical space of the pulpit is shown as embodying traces of history in the ways it physically represents relationships and ideas. Mountford emphasizes that 'spaces have heuristic power over their inhabitants and spectators by forcing them to change both their behavior and, sometimes, their view of themselves'. The story of Volgograd's reconstruction is inseparable from the metanarrative of modernism with its faith in rational planning and the intertwining of the processes of industrialization and urbanization.
