In Visible Presence makes a significant intervention in debates about memory in contemporary Russia, especially remembrance of the Second World War and state terror. Its method of conducting interviews mostly over the period 2006–2008 with three generations of 56 families, identified by a market research company is key. The subjects told their families’ stories through their domestic photographic collection. While these were often highly conventional, with the “Great Patriotic War” dominating, they also showed how family photographs can grant penetrating insights into the undervalued everyday and domestic life of the Soviet period.

The authors ground their analysis in an extensive literature theorizing photography; using it ad hoc to shed light on various aspects of the images. The book’s numerous reproductions on semi-gloss paper invite sustained contemplation. The most telling passages supply contexts, such as Soviet amateur photography, starting in the 1920s and expanding from the 1950s, where photographers were prompted to impart an ideological slant to their images. Likewise, the book examines Soviet tourist photography’s configuration of the Soviet space as ideologically homogenous, already belonging to the tourist rather than distant and exotic, and hence affirming the Soviet state’s greatness. These photos conveyed little sense of the downsides of Soviet era tourism (shared rooms and fixed itineraries). This fostered nostalgia and worse: “[t]oday, we see how further reverberations of these ways of seeing may underlie the support many Russian citizens have expressed for the violent redrawing of borders undertaken by the post-Soviet Russian state” (134).

Yet the relationship between public and private images is not fixed but blurred and contextual, and book examines how private archives transition to more public contexts: public frameworks of memory give individuals the tools to make sense of memories. The analysis is grounded in the extensive literature on collective memory and the growing sub-field of contemporary Russian memory of the Soviet period (although Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire is here treated as if it refers only to physical places, [137]).

The authors use their interviews to probe revealing discrepancies and silences in the various family members’ accounts. This enables them to show a new dimension of the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre, an event almost erased from Russian memory, but recently depicted in Andrei Konchalovskii’s film Dorogie tovarishchi (Dear Comrades!, 2020). It also highlights alternative constructions of a Jewish family’s wartime experience, as Soviet hero or Jewish victim, and the unusual case of a KGB employee who proudly told her story and the children’s and grandchildren’s attitudes to this. This case was the exception to the dominant “regime of knowing silence” (316). The book repeatedly stresses the difficulty of articulating the subject of the murderous dimensions of the Soviet experience: “seventeen years after the end of the USSR, the Russian public sphere contained neither discursive standards nor visual frames for making sense of one’s involvement with the repressive structures of the Soviet state” (306).

The final part of the book focuses on the way Vladimir Putin’s Russia has enlisted photographs in a campaign exploiting popular war memory to foster a sense of national pride, and generally militaristic outlook, ultimately underpinning support for adventuristic military campaigns such as the invasion of Ukraine. Specifically, the authors show how the “Immortal Regiment” campaign was transformed from an attempt to reclaim the private, personal, and tragic dimension of the war into a monumentalizing, mobilizing movement in which President Putin himself participated. This was part of a strategy of “affective management” of the past, where a shared emotional orientation to collective memories is used to block alternative narratives and interpretations (351).

The book offers a methodology that might be more widely applied, especially by scholars with roots in the region, as foreign scholars would struggle to forge the bonds of trust necessary to conduct the probing interviews that are central to the book. Indeed, a comparative study might have been a good idea to see how differently this picture played out in the other former Union republics. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how the methodology could be applied in Russia in the near future, or in other former Soviet states in which freedom of speech and democracy have been curtailed or suppressed.