A Death Cult on a Living Land
A Russian missile hits the concrete sarcophagus that protects Chornobyl’s exploded nuclear station, as I prepare this text. Fire is being tamed, as I write.
February 14, 2025
Dreaming of Necropolis
In the middle of the Red Square in Moscow, there is a semantically and architecturally curious object. A stepped pyramid realised in black and red stone, inspired by ancient Egyptian, Greek and Mesopotamian funerary architecture. Its stepped structure signified the connection of the diseased leader to the gods and uplifted their uncontested, timeless authority. Strict lines, sharp angles, and rim stones suggest the ritualistic purpose of the construction. It was built by a Soviet architect Alexey Shchusev in 1930 to house the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin, making it a real ritualistic tomb. The interior is marked by the dim light and solemn atmosphere, as the line of people move past the illuminated dead body. As of Today, Lenin’s body has been embalmed and taken care of by a special crew for 101 years, over a century. For a brief moment, the body of Joseph Stalin was put on display, as well, but as a result of de-Stalinisation, it was buried under the walls of the Kremlin.
Soviet schools had it in their obligatory program to take their students to Lenin’s Mausoleum, for a demonstration of a long-dead leader in a pool of formaldehyde inside an ominous structure that recalls a Mesopotamian ziggurat.[1] Besides an attraction for school children, the building serves as a stage for the country’s leaders as they observe massive military parades held on different occasions throughout the year. An important and unmissable part of these events are processions of people holding the photographs of presumed Soviet soldiers who perished in the Second World War (I use the word “presumed” here, because it is hard to say, at this point, who is who). Russians call this procession “The Immortal Regiment”, an immortal Soviet army.[2] The monuments of this category are sprinkled all over Russia and are cared for with utmost precision. Any violation of such a monument is severely punished.
Let us sum it up. The central square of a country hosts a mummy of a former Soviet leader inside what looks like (and serves as) an ancient ziggurat. Hundreds of people pass through this construction daily to meet the dead body of Lenin face-to-face, among them children. Leaders use it to observe the parades of deadly machinery, completed with the improvised army of the undead. The tombs are cared for with a religious dedication. While it sounds surreal, this is the Russian politics of memory. It does not mourn or honour the dead, it puts the dead above the alive.
In 2019, a Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe wrote Necropolitics, expanding on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. The book explores power structures that render entire communities, territories, and even nations—both human and non-human—disposable, determining who may live and who must die. Mbembe identifies colonialism and ecocide as death worlds, spaces of slow, systematic destruction where vulnerability is constant.
“Russia operates a necropolitical regime on both national and transnational levels. While exalting the dead, the living are relegated to extreme poverty or absorbed into the human military machine.”
Russia operates a necropolitical regime on both national and transnational levels. While exalting the dead, the living are relegated to extreme poverty or absorbed into the human military machine. Ukrainian soldiers have recently reported wave-like assaults and suicide bombers deployed from the occupied territories.[3]
Kill The Living, Summon The Dead
One of the most overlooked consequences of necropolitics is ecocide. The scars war leaves on land and landscapes run deeper than they appear—restoring devastated ecosystems may take decades if it is possible at all. Soil, poisoned by debris and toxic waste, will remain barren for generations of farmers. In practice, this not only deprives the local population of food but also undermines the long-term economic stability of a country whose international trade relies on agriculture.
Internationally, the ecocide legislation is an ongoing struggle but some countries adopted it anyway. Ukraine incorporated ecocide in its criminal law in 2001, as a reflection on the ecological disasters of the Chornobyl scale. Conceptually, recognition of ecocide as a crime makes the non-human dimension “grievable”. The concept of grievability was introduced by Judith Butler in 2009 in “Frames of War”. Essentially, she was referring to human lives that can be mourned or not, when lost. She criticised the government’s decisions to grieve some communities while forgetting about others.[4] This concept can be extended to the non-human world, which suffers the disasters of war just as much as humans do. By acknowledging nature’s subjectivity and upholding its right to integrity, we create the possibility of mourning animals, trees, and entire ecosystems when they are killed or destroyed. Consequently, it makes the killing and destruction of non-human subjects a crime.
Russian war against Ukraine has been taking a heavy toll on the country’s nature. The explosion of the Kakhovka dam on June 6, 2023, did not only flood an entire city, destroying properties and taking human lives — it swept away some of the rare species along with their ecosystems. Most of the damage is irreversible. The images of Kakhovka were striking: an endless body of muddy water, roofs of the private houses emerging here and there.[5]
The aftermath of Kakhovka dam explosion, photo Assosiated Press
The effects of what was named “the biggest man-made ecological disaster of the past decades” go far beyond the territory it affected directly. In her research, Oksana Chepelyk, a Ukrainian video artist, traces the possible “butterfly effect” of the Kakhovka dam disaster to the Mediterranean. The video diptych paints a comprehensive picture of the immediate result of the catastrophe that flooded a whole city. She worries that despite its scale and significance, the event did not receive the attention it required. The attention can be a warning about the immediate effects the ecocide of Ukraine can have on the rest of the Mediterranean.
“Beyond its obvious ecological impact, this particular Russian crime is an assault on life itself.”
Oksana Chepelyk, Ecocide, 2023. Art exhibition at the City Works Water Tower Wesel, Brandstraße 44 in Wesel.
Beyond its obvious ecological impact, this particular Russian crime is an assault on life itself. Unlike cases where ecocide is a byproduct—such as missile debris poisoning the land for decades—this was a deliberate act of aggression against both human and non-human species. While humans often manage to survive such disasters, animals, plants, and rare species of fish and insects do not. The Ukrainian artist known as Kinder Album explores the mourning of the non-human in her work, returning us to the concept of grievability. One of her pieces depicts a woman crossing a flooded city, accompanied by a dozen different species of animals and birds—an image of coexistence and resilience in the face of catastrophe.
Kinder Album, Russia’s Ecocide in Ukraine, 2023.
This is not the first time Kinder Album has explored empathy toward the natural and animal world. In the days following Russia’s full-scale invasion, many Ukrainians were forced to flee their homes, carrying only small bags of essentials—and their pets. Dogs, cats, birds—whatever companions they had, they took with them. Those animals left behind for various reasons were rescued by volunteer groups who broke into apartments to save the frightened and starving creatures. In many cases, their owners soon returned for them. Ukrainians’ deep care for animals, whether their own or not, was so striking that multiple news outlets covered it. But for those who had to abandon their homes overnight, there was never a question—pets are family, and family comes along.[6]
Kinder Album, I Want to Save All The Animals of Ukraine, 2022.
Nikita Kadan, Crater and Face I, 2024.
In his text to the exhibition The Radial Bone, Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan asks to imagine the monuments to killed insects or a broken tree branch. He looks at Ukrainian earth through multiple different lenses: as a precious resource Ukraine has always been famous for; as an imperial label that deemed all Ukrainians “natural-born farmers”, and therefore close to the earth, simple, manageable; as a marker of self-identification for the same people of Ukraine, who used their tools for working the camps as a weapon during the appraisals against the oppressive regimes. He mourns the wounded camps through a ritualistic act of giving a face to the wounds. A series of drawings with charcoal feature animal masks on the bottom of the craters from the Russian missiles. The somewhat folkloristic masks enrich the land with character and a name, making it possible to mourn when it is gone.[7]
“ Even the war Russia wages on Ukraine has a simple and plain purpose: to destroy, to erase off of the face of the Earth, whether it is a village, a city, an infrastructural nod, or a woodland. ”
The sensibility of Ukrainian artists towards the non-human dimension of war reveals the traditional closeness between humans and nature in Ukrainian culture and the way of living. It comes in a striking contrast with the Russian cult of death, where every man is a dead man even while his heart is still beating, and everything, human and non-human, is just expendable. Russia’s natural resources are being extracted by the low-paid workers round-the-clock. Even the war Russia wages on Ukraine has a simple and plain purpose: to destroy, to erase off of the face of the Earth, whether it is a village, a city, an infrastructural nod, or a woodland. On August 17, 2024, a toxic slick was detected in the Seym river, coming from the Russian village Tyotkino, on the border with Ukraine. The deadly waters quickly made it to the Sumy region, pouring into the Desna River. The river suddenly went quiet. Later, machines pulled tons of dead fish and molluscs that died of asphyxia when the oxygen levels in the water dropped to zero due to the presence of highly toxic agents. Today, Desna is the first officially dead river in Europe.[8] The scale of the disaster is incalculable, the damage is irreversible, the grief is unbearable.
Lesia Vasylchenko is another Ukrainian artist I have recently met in Bologna, at the opening of her personal exhibition. Her research profoundly touches the dimensions of time — human, non-human, virtual or future. Her video installation is based on her essay Chronosphere.[9] The non-human dimension in the video is presented as an imaginary dialogue between wounded trees that look for justice and punishment for those who crippled them. The human time in this artwork is reflected by the number of minutes a family needs to get from their home to a bomb shelter during the air raid in Kyiv. Virtual time is the Near-Real Time that takes for a message to travel from point A to point B in the era of instant data sharing. The technology of Near-Real Time transformed modern warfare. In her essay, Vasylchenko argues that the Russian war in Ukraine is the ultimate laboratory for testing the latest technology on the battlefield. Finally, the future time dimension is referred to an imaginary, possibly apocalyptic, future. The video sequence shows an exploded reactor of the Zaporizhia nuclear plant, one of the most probable ecological disasters awaiting. The time one spends in fear of this future belongs to the fourth dimension of the Chronosphere.
Chronosphere, a video installation by Ukrainian artist Lesia Vasylchenko (2024.) photo by Michele Amaglio, courtesy Adiacenze, Bologna.
Lesia Vasylchenko seems hopeful, though: her video ends with a speculative Court of Time (a reference to the International Court of The Hague), which will listen to every non-human testimony of the war. It will call for claims from nature, trees, insects, animals, and dust, making a case of an overwhelming crime against life that Russia has been committing in Ukraine for more than a decade now.
Eurom, and Eurom. 2019. “Lenin’s Mausoleum: A Haunted House on Red Square [1] -.” - Magazine of the European Observatory on Memories (blog). December 20, 2019. https://europeanmemories.net/magazine/lenins-mausoleum-a-haunted-house-on-red-square-1/.
Fedor, J. (2017). Memory, Kinship and the Mobilization of the Dead: The Russian State and the ‘Immortal Regiment’ Movement. In J. Fedor, M. Kangaspuro, J. Lassila, & T. Zhurzhenko (Eds.), War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66523-8
Post, Kyiv. 2025. “Series of Bombings Rock Ukraine’s Recruitment Centers.” Kyiv Post, February 5, 2025. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/46638.
Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable?
Sabbagh, Dan, and Julian Borger. 2023. “Thousands Flee Homes as Collapse of Dam Is Blamed on Russian Forces.” The Guardian, June 7, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/ukraine-accuses-russia-of-blowing-up-nova-kakhovka-dam-near-kherson.
Gornstein, Leslie. 2022. “People — and Pets — Flee War in Ukraine.” CBS News. March 18, 2022. https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/ukraine-war-refugees-pets/3/.
Voloshyn Gallery. (2024). The Radial Bone. Retrieved from https://voloshyngallery.art/exhibitions/88-the-radial-bone/
Harding, Luke, Artem Mazhulin, and Alessio Mamo. 2024. “‘Everything Is Dead’: Ukraine Rushes to Stem Ecocide After River Poisoning.” The Guardian, October 1, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/01/ukraine-seim-river-poisoning-chernihiv-ecocide-.
Vasylchenko, Lesia. 2024. “Chronosphere.” December 10, 2024. https://networkcultures.org/longform/2024/12/10/chronosphere/.
