ABSTRACT
The institutionalized network of commemorative sites in a city is made up of institutionally demanded entities. This chapter focuses on the local memorializing of the 'local war' in Afghanistan, which has taken the form of small-scale museums/clubs, acting both as meeting places and places of remembrance. The task of organizing a museum/club that will serve the local socio-collective memory is installed in a living cultural space. The topic of representation outside the bounds of art demands clarification, as there is a collective intention, found upon the potential of socio-collective memory, on the part of actors with a specific goal that mobilizes their memorialization. The museum as an act of collective memory serves the Afghan veterans as an important resource for identity formation and strengthens their solidarity and helps them to gain position in the social and political spaces of modern Russia - between history and myth, pride and bitterness, remembrance and forgetting.
