title: Politicizing war memorialization in Soviet and post-Soviet Sevastopol
abstract: After the 1941–1944 destruction of Sevastopol, local urban planners erected monuments and changed place names of the city to connect symbolically the “two great defenses” of the Crimean War and World War II. The reverence for these two wars overshadowed the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet leaders, and travel guidebooks taught visitors and locals alike the city’s history of heroic feats for the defense of Russia. This has led to a remarkable persistence of a heroic narrative through several chang