The title of Jeremy Hicks's monograph might initially be misread as mere metaphor. Yet this extensively researched case study literally focuses on the Victory Banner raised atop the Reichstag in 1945, exploring the ever-shifting mnemonic and political functions its stories and images acquired under subsequent Soviet and Russian leaders. The book traces the banner onwards from its (staged) appearance in Evgenii Khaldei's iconic 1945 photograph of flag-raising Red Army soldiers on the Reichstag's roof. The study follows its re-manifestations in late-Soviet cinema, on television, in (post-)Soviet parades and museums, all the way up to Putin-era YouTube clips and reenactments. Charting the banner's peregrinations, Hicks brings into relief its evolution into a mythologized event, holy artifact, and endlessly re-mediated symbol.
From the outset, the image of a Soviet flag atop the Reichstag was deemed an appropriate climax for official accounts of the victory over Nazism. Hicks demonstrates how directors, journalists, and photographers took great pains to link this symbol to the charisma of the Soviet leadership, thus fostering an entwinement of memory and power still painfully relevant. Iulii Raizman's 1945 film Berlin already presented the banner's raising, specifically on the Reichstag, as an act directly ordered by Iosif Stalin. Mikheil Chiaureli's 1950 film The Fall of Berlin pushed the association further, with Stalin making a deus ex machina appearance in central Berlin just moments after self-sacrificing soldiers stormed the Reichstag and planted the rooftop flag.
Building on Alexei Yurchak's study of the ritualization of late-Soviet officialdom, Hicks subsequently documents the increasingly formulaic invocations of the banner's symbolism. In its broad outlines, then, this is an account of the progressive “petrification” of remembrance, a channeling of wartime memories into rigid, ready-made frames. The flag itself—musealized and irregularly paraded during May 9 celebrations—became a palpable authentication of these endlessly regurgitated memory scripts.
Meanwhile, the actual messiness of the Reichstag takeover was extruded from official accounts. Several banners, large and small, had been planted by different Red Army units on various parts of the Reichstag's roof in spring 1945; the first flag did not halt the fighting in Berlin; “documentalist” imagery showing the flag had invariably been staged; and the soldiers given official credit (Mikhail Egorov, Meliton Kantariia) had not been among the first flag-raisers. Moreover, the Kremlin-backed triumphalism elided uncomfortable memories of unheroic suffering and avoidable deaths, including those attributable to strategic errors.
The compulsive efforts to stabilize the banner's multivalent symbolic potential, however, were never completely successful. Hicks's detailed research into discarded photographs, jettisoned film scenes, and secret historical conferences reveals how the banner's significance was repeatedly contested and revised, especially during moments of political upheaval. The book's chronological structure spotlights the recurring tensions surfacing at such moments: the propagandistic benefits of monumentalist depictions, for instance, had to be weighed against the reality effect of documentalism; the story's much-needed validation by veterans against the risks posed by their unchecked authority; the banner's association with the Kremlin's might against its residual association with the communist cause more broadly. Intriguing (and sometimes truly Tolstoian) are the Khrushchev-era efforts to reframe the triumphant flag-raising scene as an act of mass heroism, the story purged of its mythologized protagonists (Stalin, Egorov, Kantariia) even as the myth's appeal was meant to be preserved.
Especially relevant are Boris Yeltsin's mid-1990s attempts to steal the Communist Party's thunder through half-hearted rehabilitations of the Soviet myth. In their wake came more self-assertive Putin-era presentations of the Victory Banner as marker of an uninterrupted tradition of power and remembrance. Such messages of continuity have recently been relayed through a new-media aesthetics that targets younger audiences, “immersing” them in history and giving them a (virtual) role in the war's symbolic conclusion at the Reichstag.
Hicks's emphasis on Kremlin-controlled images and narratives leaves less space for remediations that subvert the banner's validated meanings or challenge its preeminence in official memory. Recall the “historical” footage from Raizman's Berlin inserted at the end of the twelve-part television series Seventeen Moments of Spring (dir. Tatiana Lioznova, 1973). Raizman's climactic scenes of fast-moving, heroic flag-raisers appear strangely inappropriate given the contrast with Seventeen Moments’ slow pace, inconclusive ending, and melancholy protagonist.
Nonetheless, Hicks's understandable focus on state-sanctioned symbolism now seems acutely relevant. Russian soldiers in Vladimir Putin's unprovoked 2022 war against Ukraine adorned their tanks with facsimiles of the Soviet banner, signaling commitment to the Russian leadership's ludicrous historical parallels and deluded myths of Soviet/Russian triumphalism. Hicks's book is essential for understanding how World War II symbolism could accumulate the self-righteous emotive and political authority that is being cynically, and literally, weaponized today.
