Kateryna Volochniuk and Vlada Vazheyevskyy utilise the history of the Journal of the Military Builder, produced by the Russian Ministry of Defence, to investigate the process of Russia’s settler colonial erasure on the occupied territories of Ukraine and expand on the power dynamics of archiving practices. Since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the violence of the oppressor has exercised its power through images. This brings the authors to question the legitimacy of visual documentation and the extent to which it should be perceived as a credible source. In order to include the multitude of experiences of Ukrainians, they propose to refer to multi-modal anarchives and alter-archives, which will help us to embrace gaps in memory, individual stories and affects. 

In the summer of 2022, Russian occupiers consecrated a stained-glass window, depicting one orthodox warrior monk called Peresvet. They created this stained-glass window from shards of glass collected in Mariupol from embattled streets directly after the cities’ decimation and subsequent occupation by the Russian Armed Forces, an ongoing process which has so far seen up to 100,000 Ukrainians killed by certain estimates. [2] The work has stood in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Moscow Oblast since September 2022.

The warrior-monk Alexander Peresvet was made famous in both Russian historical and religious discourse for having fought the Tatar champion Temir-Mirza in single combat at the onset of the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. The story goes that in the battle the men killed each other, however (for obvious political reasons) some Russian legends consider Peresvet the winner of the fight as his corpse stayed in the saddle longer and was returned to his army by his horse. Thus, the stained-glass window brought to Moscow from occupied Mariupol depicts a dead man.

The necrophilic impulse behind the creation of an ‘artwork’ depicting the corpse of a Russian hero, made up of shards of glass from buildings where Ukrainian bodies may still be trapped under the rubble, is at the essence of what this text deals with. This death drive, manifested in numerous extensions of the Russian state, is evident both in its philosophy and history, as well as in contemporary Russian culture. Decadence, the romanticisation of desperation and hopelessness, and dark tourism are all features that permeate Russian society. However, the cruellest manifestation of this impulse is found in the Russian self-documentation and archiving of war crimes. The latter is of particular interest to us, and there is perhaps no archive as illustrious as the Journal of the Military Builder [Военный Строитель], a quarterly publication, produced by the Russian Ministry of Defence. [3]

Military builders as an institution have roots going back to the Russian Empire, although their defining characteristics were solidified during the Soviet era. The Soviet military-industrial complex exemplifies the extensive integration of civilian infrastructure, human labour, and natural resources into the state’s military apparatus. Military construction units were not only part of the Soviet army but also comprised a vast workforce. According to the Military History Journal [Военно-исторический журнал] [4], by the 1990s, the number of personnel in these units exceeded 330,000. In 1990, these formations were deemed unconstitutional by the state and identified as a form of forced labour (with some reports suggesting that the military construction units were using forced labourers from prisons), leading to their disbandment. However, it was not long before Russian political and military leaders began advocating for the reintegration of the military into the industrial sectors. This push eventually led to the re-establishment of military builders under the Ministry of Defense in 2016. As outlined in the Military Construction and Modernization of the Russian Armed Forces [Военное строительство и модернизация вооруженных сил России] report by the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (2004): ‘Russia also needs a decisive de-specialisation of the military industry and its integration with the civilian sector of the industry as the main mobilisation base for arms production.’ [5]

On 29 December 2016, Putin issued Decree No. 727, entitled ‘On the Abolition of the Federal Agency for Special Construction.’ [6] This decree transferred the responsibilities of Russia’s Spetsstroy, along with all engineering and road-building military units under its command, to the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation. [7] As one of the co-authors of this text, Vlada Vazheyevskyy, stated in their earlier text on military builders: ‘This fusion created a more organised, singular, large-scale operation that would prove extremely valuable to Russia in its settler colonial ambitions and conquest.’ [8]

Since 2017 hundreds of military and military-adjacent objects have been built by these military builders, both within mainland Russia, and on the territories that it illegally occupies. The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, where the stained glass window depicting Peresvet is kept, is one such object. 

The history of already constructed infrastructures, the present state of ongoing projects and their future dimensions are all archived in the Journal of the Military Builder. The journal has been published quarterly since 2018. The 24 issues that have been put out at time of writing hold records and traces of settler colonial infrastructural violence similar to other military construction journals, yet they differ vastly in regard to the transparency of the crimes committed, which we will touch on later in the text. In order to properly analyse the ‘treasure trove’ of the journal’s contents, we should first make some clarifications regarding both necrophilia and archives.

To begin with, it is necessary to understand our usage and understanding of the concept of necrophilia, used in Erich Fromm’s The Heart of Man (1964) and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973). According to Fromm:

‘Biophilia […] is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group. The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old.’ [9]

‘Necrophilia […] is the passion to destroy life and the attraction to all that is dead, decaying, and purely mechanical.’ [10]

As such, they can be loosely defined as the love of life, and the love of death. We don’t view these two qualities in opposition or as specific emotional disorders, but rather as natural urges, inherent to the human condition. However, the prevalence of necrophilic desire within Russian colonial culture is what we criticise in this text. Archiving as a practice can be seen as evidence of a necrophilic desire, characterised by an obsession with collecting and preserving objects and ideas, potentially at the expense of living entities and their space. This desire does not necessarily link to something inorganic, but rather a widespread desire to go back to something in the past. Achille Mbembe likens archiving to a “ritual which results in the resuscitation of life.” [11] However, within the traditional power dynamics of archiving, there exists a profound tendency to convert living entities into inorganic objects, subsequently categorising and consigning them like objects in a museum. This process bears a resemblance to Putin’s intent to maintain the Russian state, preventing any alterations to its cultural, social, or political structures.

***
Military builders represent a dissonant formation. On one hand, construction typically implies the creation of something new as ‘the building sites are very explicitly places where futures are being imagined.’ [12] However, the military builders are not only involved in constructing something new but also in a process of necrophilic recycling. The story of the stained glass depicting Persvet here provides the perfect example: the so-called ‘peace bringers’ destroyed an area and then repurposed its remnants to construct their own historical mythology. Similarly, military builders, on a larger scale, erase entire cities and their inhabitants, rewrite the historical archive, and build upon the bodies of the murdered. By doing so, they are not striving for something new but aim to revert to the long-established colonial infrastructures of the Russian state, perpetuating the expansionist practices that have characterised it for centuries.

Like most archives, the journal collection engages in a continual process of selection, thus determining what will be made visible and what will remain hidden, and establishing a certain order. They do not hide this selectivity from their readers, as is visible in the following translated excerpt taken from one of their issues. [13]

‘Not all secrets should be known. They don’t talk about it in public, don’t scream about it on the radio, and don’t write in the newspapers. Because it is about the crucial work in the construction and creation of special infrastructure that is done by the MOD’s Military Builders. [...] Here, we could present numerous modern fortifications, yet they won’t ever appear, and neither will the information on our rocket complexes, navy infrastructure, satellite tracking centers, and countless other special objects. Otherwise, it seems that all of the world's intelligence services would become subscribers to our journal. But at least we can show our readers the most modern shooting range built by the military builders in Donbas. One of… This is only one example.’ [14]

When examining the journals of military builders as archives of settler colonial infrastructural violence, it becomes clear that this phenomenon is not new. Much like the organisation itself, these journals draw on traditions established during the Soviet period. A prime example is the journal USSR in Construction [СССР на стройке], which was published in five different languages [15], targeting both domestic and international audiences. Contemporary military builders often reference these earlier publications, citing them in articles and featuring them on their YouTube channels, demonstrating continuity with their Soviet predecessors. USSR in Construction serves as a prototype for this kind of media, documenting construction projects with a propagandistic tone. It also began focusing on the portrayal of construction workers, highlighting their significance. The production and dissemination of imagery depicting diligent workers and heroic figures became essential to sustaining the momentum of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan. [16]

A brief glance at these journals reveals the typical tropes used to narrate the ‘power’ of Soviet construction efforts and the supposed benefits of progress, industrialisation, and new opportunities they were bringing to the ‘underdeveloped’ nations of Central Asia. For instance, the first issue features a segment on the Kalmyks, an ethnic group which predominantly lives in Kalmykia in the North Caucasus. The depiction, focussed on industrialised landscapes, vast rural emptiness, and typical images of Kalmyks in national dress,  exemplifies the processes of colonisation, industrialisation, and the integration of this region into the USSR. The language which was used was clearly colonial, comparing the ‘backwards’ indigenous people to the ‘white saviour’ Soviet authorities. These accounts also reflect the extensive extractivism and forced changes in the natural landscape and agricultural practices which were central to projects throughout the Soviet Union (as seen in the third issue of 1949).

What stands out in the Journal of the Military Builder is the audacity and transparency with which they record and showcase their war crimes to the public. While their Soviet predecessors often relied on tactics such as violent deportations, the extraction of human and natural resources, and other forms of exploitation to develop infrastructure in occupied territories, contemporary military builders, in collaboration with the army, employ a scorched-earth strategy. This involves the complete annihilation of existing civilian and military-industrial infrastructure — some of which was established during the Soviet era — to construct their new order. This process can be described as ‘necrophilic recycling’, especially when viewed in the context of the ongoing legacy of Soviet infrastructure.

This leads us to the question of the motivations behind such a meticulous practice of self-documentation and archiving. In their article, Malyarenko and Kormych discuss Russia’s use of the victimhood narrative to assert claims over territories and infrastructure built during the imperial or Soviet periods. They cite examples such as the Black Sea Shipyard in Mykolaiv, the Antonov Aeronautical Complex in Kyiv, the Yuzhmash aerospace plant in Dnipro, the Kremenchuk Steel Plant in Poltava Oblast, and the gas transportation system, all of which Putin has argued were ‘built entirely by the Soviet Union or even date back to Catherine the Great.’ [18] This illustrates how Russia’s strategy of ‘recycling’ operates: by asserting that new infrastructure projects are Russian-built, they seek to establish a narrative that these sites will be later regarded as part of Russian legacy, and therefore part of the ‘Russian world’. This also extends beyond political borders and delves into the fluid realm of our imagination, as visual archives significantly shape the way we construct our imaginative geographies. These archives do more than reinforce political narratives; they deeply influence how people perceive spaces, shaping collective dreams/nightmares and the imagination tied to particular landscapes.

And that is why archiving is such an important tool for the military builder. The transparency regarding the depictions of their crimes in journals illustrates how archives can serve as tools for legitimising narratives; by placing information in an archive, it is validated as valuable and legitimate due to the archive’s esteemed position in the epistemological framework. However, this extensive self-documentation of their crimes differs from traditional settler colonial archives, where the violence towards dissenting bodies is more explicit in content, prompting critical inquiry into new models of archiving and the politics of erasure.

***
In her crucial text, Violence is an Image: Weaponization of Visuality During the War in Ukraine, Lesia Kulchynska examines two distinct forms of visuality in the context of military violence: one as a defensive tool for documentation and resistance, and the other as an offensive mechanism for legitimising acts of violence. [19] She also references Nicholas Mirzoeff’s assertion that ‘visuality has become a weapon of authority, not a tool against it’, [20] highlighting the dual role of imagery in both reinforcing and challenging power structures.

This observation serves as an important starting point, particularly when examining the Journal of the Military Builder. In its case asserting power does not translate to graphic depictions of violence, dead bodies, or ruined urban landscapes. A review of various issues reveals that much of the visual content comprises photographs of buildings, artworks or decorations created for those structures, portraits of workers and military officials, planning schemes, landscapes, and occasional images of individuals in the background of these settings. A notable method of representation is the frequent use of aerial views, emphasising the buildings from above. The traditional indexical function of photography is disrupted, revealing that explicit images of destruction and suffering are not required to convey violence. Instead, the seemingly neutral photographs of buildings, architectural plans, and constructions can evoke a profound sense of terror, impacting our perception, imagination, and physical response.
In the archival realm, these images raise familiar challenges related to categorisation and standardisation often encountered in this line of work. As highlighted in the article Sensitivity and Access: Unlocking the Colonial Visual Archive with Machine Learning, where the authors discuss how multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) can assist in evaluating sensitive materials from colonial archives, one issue that emerged was the difficulty of identifying implicit content. [21] A seemingly benign image may carry violent undertones without depicting explicit violence.

This case involving AI may illustrate the main problem that such archives contain in their audacious visual representation of war crimes, or more precisely, the architectural obscuring of those crimes. The issue lies in the visual signification itself. It is no secret that brigades of military builders are deployed to quickly erase traces of violent battles, killings, deaths, etc., and to build upon these remnants to present their own version of events, thereby preventing future investigations of the crimes.

In his reflection on the so-called ‘threshold of detectability’ in forensic investigations, Eyal Weizman identifies a crucial dynamic when researching both Holocaust denialism and secret drone attacks. [22] The inability of satellite images to capture small holes from U.S. drone strikes, or the challenges in analysing holes in the Auschwitz crematorium — exacerbated by Nazi attempts to destroy evidence — creates space for what is called ‘negative evidence’. [23] This concept suggests that the inability to detect something is interpreted as proof that it never happened. As Weizman explains, ‘[t]his form of denial is not simply rhetorical, but rather is made possible by the production of a frontier that has territorial, juridical, and visual characteristics.’ [24] The absence of material here (let’s say an image of the destroyed building by an airstrike) is set in opposition to the personal, which manifests in various sensorial or oral forms (testimony from the victim who survived the same airstrike).

Therefore, the visual evidence of war crimes turned out to be not needed to feel the dreadful eeriness that the materials in the journals convey. For they do so through absence, absence of something that should be there, many somethings, whole life-worlds that were ended abruptly by the scorching of bodies, land, and more than human subjectivities that allowed for this archive to be produced. Every Ukrainian feels this absence, it has been permanently etched into our bodies and psyches, our memory and future imaginaries, and the very land which keeps us alive. 

The violence of the Journal of the Military Builder extends far beyond the visual, its playfield is the realm of memory, both collective and individual, international and national. The journal amplifies the trauma-induced gaps in memory of the subjects experiencing erasure, and makes any future claim for accountability and reparations an impossibility. The production team behind it understands the power that it has at producing history in the absence of any foreign or Ukrainian journalists, in the absence of anybody that could tell the tales of destruction and the geno/eco/urbicide that went on in the process of reconstruction. 

This is why, for example, a documentary film 20 Days in Mariupol [25] is as important of an artefact as it is. The film is a glimpse into the beginning of the process of settler colonial erasure which creates the ground for fabulated archives, for a re-writing of the present which will go down in history. [26] We have no claim to that present – the genocide in Mariupol – due to the gap between the scenes in the film and the clean, final cut presented in the Journal of the Military Builder. For as long as we do not have an archive of erasure which tackles that of the visible ‘prosperity’ of the city which the journal presents we do not have a claim to the history of the genocide in Mariupol. This is perhaps where the bigger problem lies, of the need to go beyond the visual archive as a document that legitimises any given claim to a given history. 

The invisibilities and the gaps in the journals should be in themselves a verdict, a guilty stamp in the history of the Russian Federation, yet the Journal of the Military Builder plays by the rules of history-making, it produces a linear, visual archive which cements its claim to the history of the places it makes visible and invisible at the same time. If we take the notion that as long as spectators exist, an aesthetic space exists, in other words as long as we keep interacting with such visual archives they remain legitimate, are we not guilty in sustaining the violence such visual archives carry?

The existence of the Journal of the Military Builder, and other fabulated visual archives is a fact, a given which provides an impulse for the collective Ukrainian body to react, to disprove, to claim otherwise, to look for any visual material which could be put out in opposition. While such efforts are understandable and needed, how productive are they for us to claim our history, which was undermined by the same visuality we cling onto? Could we instead begin working on the counter histories, to the ones such archives establish, by appealing to other tools of perceptions and other ways of claiming history? If our claims cannot be verified for the foreseeable future, for the bodies and scars on the land that are their very verification have been built over and buried under the encroaching infrastructures of the settler colonial state, do we not need to shift our methodologies?

If our recent history is one which has an unrecoverable past, and a present we can barely grasp visually, should we not turn to other, less established methodologies which make space for the gaps in memory and unverifiable stories against the dominant, visual archives? The Center for Spatial Technology’s Spatial Archive of the Mariupol Drama Theater [27] comes to mind as an example of an alternative way of documentation, as does the Mariupol Memory Park project [28] and Dim Zvuku’s ‘Sound Experiences of War’. [29] The three projects do not make a claim to the history of our struggle by relying solely on visual tools. Centre for Spatial Technologies relies on storytelling and first-hand accounts in order to reconstruct the events of the bombing of Mariupol Drama Theater. It visualises the events through spatial reconstruction, but it does not rely on visual evidence to do so. Mariupol Memory Park is an example of an autonomous anarchive – a concept used by its founding collective and described in an article by Ksenia Rybak. In her article on the concept, Ksenia writes, ‘While traditional archives are fixated on artifacts, anarchives work with collective memory and discourse, thus turning archiving into a never-ending creative process.’ [30] Mariupol Memory Park is a multi-modal collection of traces, embodied responses and stories, audio-walks and memories of the many people for whom the city is dear. While the visual aspect is present, it does not hold any more power than the many other modes of remembrance. ‘Sound Experiences of War’ abandons visual documentation completely, instead creating a sonic archive, based on podcasts, and live transmissions of people, landscapes and infrastructures at war. Yet perhaps there are more sensory and embodied ways we could explore to tell the tales of the daily erasure we continue to experience. 

This is where experimenting with ‘alter-archival’ practices – multi-modal, sensory ways of documenting, storing and displaying experiences – can prove useful.. What could a haptic or an olfactory alter-archive tell us of these times? Or a somatic one which utilises somatic practices to make visible the invisible traces of wartime on the body, or its desires and needs at such a time. Such approaches do not carry any inherent advantages or disadvantages in relation to the visual, and such a binary paradigm is not worth pursuing. What they do allow however is the making of our own claims to the past, present and future, through sensorial methodologies better suited to the multitudes of experiences that all Ukrainian subjects continue to accumulate. We believe that the effort to reclaim our history and work towards any sort of accountability for the genocide Russia brought onto our land in the future requires both our national body and the international body to de-center the visual as the authoritative mode of documenting, claiming, and legitimising history to make space for multi-modal anarchives and alter-archives more tailored to our experiences of and in wartime.

Our reading of the Journal of the Military Builder suggests that rather than opposing the two distinct forms of visuality — aggressive and defensive — in a reactionary manner, we should consider challenging the very concept of the visual archive itself. While the task at hand is beyond difficult, it could be achieved by creating room for other, more speculative modes of documenting and grouping together Russian war crimes and their effective and affective traces. Countering Russian propaganda head-on is an important task in the post-truth environment of today, yet could we not couple this effort with the effort to create sensorial archives beyond the visual, towards imaginaries more authentic to us? Alter-archives filled with memories, emotional responses and other fragments of people’s disrupted lives which do not cling to the dominant modes of documentation. Such an approach could offer a more nuanced, embodied Ukrainian perspective which does not play into the necrophilic recycling of images, narratives, and lost lives carried out by the Russian occupying forces.

Editing by Ada Wordsworth.

This text came out of a bigger ongoing research project which is carried out by the working group Occupational Formations: (In)visible Infrastructures and was funded by workinprogress network (@wip.network).

Kateryna Volochniuk is a Ukraine-born, Scotland-based art historian and researcher. She is currently a SGSAH-funded PhD Сandidate at the University of St Andrews and is a Researcher at The New Centre for Research & Practice. Volochniuk’s scholarly pursuits focus on the intersection of the history of photography and memory studies. Her ongoing research project delves into the personal archive of her grandfather, within which she explores modes of documentary in Soviet photojournalism and analyses cultural production within industrial archaeology.

Vlada Vazheyevskyy is a Ukrainian anthropologist and performance artist based in Scotland. Most recently they have written on Russian carceral infrastructures in the temporarily occupied areas of Ukraine, and researched the historical and contemporary usage of the military builders by the Russian state. They make up half of the DViJKA collective with which they edited and translated the book Queer Ukraine, An Anthology of LGBTQI+ Voices During Wartime in February 2023. 

Both Volochniuk and Vazheyevskyy are researchers in the IMW funded Occupational Formations: (In)visible Infrastructures working group, which is run by members of the wip.network.

Published 19 December 2024

1. Telegram channel КАТЮША https://t.me/katyusha_russian/27.
   2. Ibid.
   3. Военный Строитель [Journal of the Military Builder] https://vskmo.ru/journal/.
   4. В. И. Прищеп, “Дебаты о стройбатах” [Debate about construction battalions], Военно-исторический журнал [Military History journal], № 2 (1991): 34-37.
   5.  “Военное строительство и модернизация вооруженных сил России” [Military construction and modernization of the Russian Armed Forces], Доклад совета по внешней и оборонной политике, Москва, апрель, 2004: 8. Accessed October 2024, https://www.svop.ru/public/docs_2004_4_15_1338701752.pdf. 
   6. A report by the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy https://cis-legislation.com/document.fwx?rgn=93924.
   7. Spetsstroy was a federal executive authority of the Russian Federation responsible for overseeing special construction, communications, and road-building projects, managed by military engineering and road-building formations.
   8. Vlada Vazheyevskyy, “Russian Military Builders, an Extension of and an Efficient Tool for the Settler Colonial State,” UNITED24 Media, July 23, 2024, https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russian-military-builders-an-extension-of-and-an-efficient-tool-for-the-settler-colonial-state-1352.
   9. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 365.
   10. Ibid, 6.
   11. Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” in Refiguring the archive (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002), 25.
   12. Aimée Joyce, Spectral Borders: History, neighbourliness and discord on the Polish-Belarusian frontier (Sean Kingston Publishing, 2024), 164.
   13. Военный Cтроитель [Military Builder], December 2023.
   14. Vlada Vazheyevskyy, “Russian Military Builders, an Extension of and an Efficient Tool for the Settler Colonial State,” UNITED24 Media, July 23, 2024, https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russian-military-builders-an-extension-of-and-an-efficient-tool-for-the-settler-colonial-state-1352.
   15. Russian, French, English, German and Spanish.
   16. Dell, Simon. “Visualizing Labour: The Problem and a Case Study, USSR in Construction.” Labour History Review 84.2 (2019): 122.
   17. Malyarenko, Tetyana, and Borys Kormych, “Russian Policy towards the Economy of Occupied Ukrainian Territories: Crawling de-Modernization.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 64, no. 2 (2023): 220–37. doi:10.1080/15387216.2023.2167097.
   18. Address by the President of the Russian Federation. February 21, 2022. Cited in Ibid.
   19. Lesia Kulchynska, “Violence is an Image: Weaponization of the Visuality During the War in Ukraine,” Institute of Network Cultures, October 26, 2022. https://networkcultures.org/tactical-media-room/2022/10/26/violence-is-an-image-weaponization-of-the-visuality-during-the-war-in-ukraine-2/.
   20. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Preface. Ineluctable Visualities” In The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, xiii-xvi. New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2011. Cited in Ibid.
   21. Jonathan Dentler, et al. “Sensitivity and Access: Unlocking the Colonial Visual Archive with Machine Learning,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 18, no.3 (2024).
   22. Eyal Weizman, “Violence at the Threshold of Detectability,” e-flux Journal 64, April 2015. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60861/violence-at-the-threshold-of-detectability/.
   23. Ibid.
   24. Ibid.
   25. 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Mstyslav Chernov (2023, PBS Distribution).
   26. Website of the film https://20daysinmariupol.com/.
   27. Mariupol Drama Theater Spatial Archive https://theater.spatialtech.info/en.
   28. Mariupol Memory Park https://www.mariupolmemorypark.space/en/.
   29. “As for now, it is quiet,” Sound Experiences of War https://42at.org.ua/.
   30. Ksenia Rybak, “‘The ruins have taught me something about myself’. Mariupol Memory Park as an autonomous anarchive,” Commons Journal, December 2022. https://commons.com.ua/en/mariupolskij-park-pamyati-avtonomnij-anarhiv/.