The rise and fall of the “Heroes of the Surgut Land”. How the Russian state works with memory of soldiers who died in the war with Ukraine

The Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug–Yugra, also known as Khanty-Mansi, is a vast region in the heart of Siberia, roughly the size of France, with a rather small population (1.7 million people, like West Virginia). It’s rich with natural gas and is considered to be among the more prospering regions of Russia. Nevertheless, the war with Ukraine took its toll on the local population.

The exhibition “Heroes of the Surgut Land,” dedicated to the residents of the region (Surgut is the largest city) who died in the war, was opened with great fanfare. At the ceremony on October 10, 2023, at the Surgut Local History Museum, various officials spoke: Mayor Andrei Filatov, Military Commissioner Andrei Kalyadin, and Archpriest Anton Isakov, rector of the Church of St. George the Victorious. Also present was Olga Volkova, mother of Private Mikhail Volkov, who died two and a half weeks after the full-scale invasion began in the Izyum district of the Kharkiv region. “[The exhibition] is really necessary for us mothers, so that our children are not forgotten, so that it is clear that they truly performed a heroic deed in defending our country,” she said.

A poster with a photo and a brief biography was dedicated to Olga Volkova’s son at the exhibition: “Volkov Mikhail Olegovich. 1999-2022. Participant in the special military operation. Private, senior driver, loader. Awards: Order of Courage. Killed in action on March 12, 2022.” A total of 61 such portraits were collected for the exhibition.

In addition, a three-dimensional letter Z [One of the state-promoted symbols for the war] with the words “Sounds of Memory” written on it, approximately one and a half meters high, was installed in the hall. This was the idea of the local branch of the ruling United Russia party, which made clay bells for the exhibition. At the grand opening, relatives of the deceased attached the bells to the letter.

“This is a social project aimed at bringing together women who have experienced grief,” says the annotation prepared by branch secretary Alena Solovyova. “So that they can come, share, simply get to know each other, spend time together, so that they are not alone at home, so that they understand that they live in a society.”

As a person involved in preparations to the exhibition told Mediazona, the initiative came personally from the head of the city, Andrei Filatov—museum staff were noticeably nervous during the preparations and criticized the administration. At first, the exhibition was planned to be held quietly, but closer to the opening, it was decided to announce the event and invite journalists.

The curator of “Heroes of the Surgut Land,” Natalya Arkadova, head of the museum’s patriotic education center, declined to comment, explaining that it was a project of the city administration. However, Mediazona obtained documents related to the preparation of the exhibition. They shed light on the mechanisms by which Russian memorial propaganda works.

The exhibition’s omissions

The collection of documents at Mediazona’s disposal is pretty diverse: methodological recommendations from the Ministry of Culture, orders from regional and city authorities, scripts for the opening ceremony, budgets, some of the internal correspondence between museum employees, photos of the people on display, sketches of posters, and professional photographs from the Chernorechensky cemetery, where many of them are buried. But most importantly, the internal documents contain detailed biographical information about all of the participants, compiled on the basis of data from military registration offices and interviews with relatives. So the work done is impressive.

“Behind each of these portraits is a whole life, cut short by war, and a feat performed to save comrades-in-arms and the motherland.” These were the words with which, according to the script from September 2023, the presenter was supposed to open the exhibition. However, in the exhibition itself, the “whole life” of the 61 “heroes of the Surgut land” was reduced to the most basic facts: full name, years of life, place of service, awards, and a standard ending—“killed in action,” with the exact date of death.

The official documents contain much richer biographies of the exhibition participants, and Mediazona decided to summarize them in a single infographic. This data was verified against the list of KIA Russian soldiers, which we are compiling together with BBC News Russian and a team of volunteers, as well as internal documents of the Wagner PMC.

The pathways of soldiers from the “Heroes of the Surgut Land” exhibition

Солдат не выбран

Many details of the lives of the “heroes of the Surgut region” suggest why the exhibition was not initially intended to be large-scale, and why the biographies were ultimately presented in such a concise manner. Among the documents is the following letter:

“Good afternoon, Ksenia Olegovna! While working with the lists for the “Heroes of Russia” project, it became clear that some of the Wagner PMC fighters were called up for the Special Military Operation from places of imprisonment, where they were serving sentences for crimes they had committed. This information is freely available on the internet and may cause a negative public reaction. Please find the list of biographies attached.”

For example, bio of Alexander Kovyazin states that he graduated from school No. 8, trained as a mechanic at vocational school No. 2, was a member of the Cossack cadet corps, did his military service in 2009-2010, worked at Surgutneftegas, and “was a hard-working, caring son and father, and a reliable friend.” He then received a suspended sentence for theft, and in July 2022, he was sent to a maximum security prison for three years for beating his drunk partner. He ended up in Penal Colony No. 11 in Surgut, from where he was recruited for the war. According to Mediazona’s calculations, a total of four participants of the exhibition were recruited from this colony, and another five from the Tyumen Penal Colony No. 2.

The exhibition says almost nothing about Kovyazin. Nor does it mention the 11 other Wagner PMC fighters who were recruited in prison.

Mikhail Volkov, whose mother spoke at the exhibition opening, was 21 years old when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. His parents compiled a detailed biographical report, which states that the young man was an active member of the “Strizhi” military-patriotic association, and after graduating from Tyumen Industrial University, he decided to do his military service. He was drafted in December 2021 and was assigned to military unit No. 91704 in Klintsy in the Bryansk region, near the Ukrainian border.

When asked to explain how the conscript ended up in the war in Ukraine, his mother Olga said, “Can I not answer that question?” Back in August 2022, independent outlet Insider published excerpts from complaints to the military prosecutor’s office in which relatives of 17 conscripts from this unit claimed that the soldiers were forced to sign contracts: “Our sons were drafted in autumn 2021 into the armed forces of the Russian Federation, in the city of Klintsy, Bryansk region, after taking the oath they were assigned to unit 91704 in Zaimishche, Klintsy district, Bryansk region. On February 12, 2022 they were sent to take part in field exercises in the Belgorod region, since February 24, 2022 contact with many of them has been lost and currently we don’t know the whereabouts of our sons.”

However, the fact that Volkov became a conscript just a few months before the war cannot be deduced from the brief information on the exhibition poster—it only states that he died on March 12, 2022.

Lyudmila Shagrova, the mother of Ivan, who was mobilized at the age of 28, says that he was wounded in the jaw when he was ambushed. “Both his cheeks were shattered. He made his way back to his comrades, who say he could only wave his arms because his mouth was broken,” she says.

Ivan Shagrov was first taken to a field hospital and then transferred to the Burdenko Military Hospital in Moscow. “They called us and said that everything was fine, that they would feed him and everything would be okay. But something went wrong, apparently they inserted the tracheostomy tube incorrectly. The doctors told us that it was allegedly inserted incorrectly in the field, but we don’t think so. We think that they probably fed him incorrectly and the tube flew out: they put him in a regular maxillofacial ward, not even in intensive care. He was conscious, wrote down our phone numbers, and after feeding, he choked and had to be resuscitated. He regained consciousness, but while they were lifting him into the elevator, he lost consciousness again, and they only resuscitated him after 14 or 15 minutes. His brain was dead,” she says.

Brothers Georgy and Nikolay Georgish were born 10 years apart, in 1981 and 1991. The older brother died on January 7, 2023, outliving his younger brother by two weeks. At the exhibition, they are presented as “volunteers of the Wagner PMC.” However, they joined the mercenary group from a penal colony in Tyumen, where they were sent after being convicted of attempting to distribute a large quantity of drugs: in 2016, the older brother was sentenced to 12 years and three months, and the younger brother to 11 years and 11 months.

“It was a good setup. The younger son lived in Lokosovo, he had a wife and a child. They set him up well. The older son came there from Krasnoselkup, and it turned out that he was in the same car, and that was it, they set him up,” their mother Lyubov Georgish says vaguely.

Along with such unsightly details, even harmless facts were washed out of the exhibition biographies: where these soldiers studied or worked, whether they had wives and children, that they were fond of pigeon racing or had mastered several specialties, and that 35 people from the exhibition are buried in the same Chernorechensky cemetery. In the spring of 2025, a large-scale improvement program was launched there: plans include renovating the crematorium building, installing heated toilets, and creating a new “Alley of Glory.”

The exhibition’s dilemma

According to memory researcher Ekaterina Klimova, even after World War II (its 1941-1945 period, when the USSR fought Nazi Germany, is referred to as the Great Patriotic War in Russia), the state faced a dilemma: should it emphasize the cost of the war and focus on the losses, or concentrate on the heroic narrative and not mention the scale of the casualties?

“Official Soviet memory tended to favor the latter. As we know, even the figure of 27 million [military and civilian losses] was not announced immediately,” says Klimova. “Losses were systematically downplayed.”

However, she does not rule out that at some point the Kremlin’s policy on this issue will change radically, and they will begin to emphasize “the cost of war and what they will probably try to sell as a victory.” In any case, the official attitude is already changing: in the first months of the war, the courts forced local media to remove pages listing residents who had died in Ukraine.

Mischa Gabowitsch, a historian, sociologist, and professor of post-Soviet studies Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, points out that this happened, first, because of the development of information technology, and secondly, because, unlike the Afghan and two Chechen wars, in the case of Ukraine after 2022, the state is interested in promoting the armed conflict and mobilising the population.

That being said, Gabowitsch sees nothing unusual in the fact that memorialisation began before the end of the war: the same thing happened in the Soviet Union during World War II, when the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Committed by German-Fascist Invaders was established, but the military and proactive Soviet officials also participated in its activities.

“The central government always had the opportunity to stop this,” the historian recalls. “And that’s what started to happen: museums and memorial complexes were closed in Leningrad, while in other cities people felt more free.”

At the same time, what became part of the canon of memory about WWII—May 9 celebrations, meetings of veterans, and so on—was invented “locally” back in the 1940s and 1950s and borrowed by the state. “These practices change the state repertoire from within. For example, the creators of the Immortal Regiment said that, according to tradition, the country's leadership watches the parade from above, looking down on the veterans from the mausoleum, but we want to individualize memory and make everyone equal. On the one hand, the state tried to take control of it, and to some extent it succeeded, although there are still activists in the movement who believe that they are not Putin’s soldiers. But as a result, Putin no longer just stands on the mausoleum, he comes with a portrait of his father,” Gabowitsch notes.

The Russian authorities have not yet come up with anything new when it comes to the forms of memorialisation. “Attempts to link someone else’s tragedy with one’s own experience are carried out through faces, which serve as the literal interface,” ​​says Serguei A. Oushakine, professor of anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. “Why people are dying is not particularly discussed in the public sphere, but it needs to be archived.”

Oushakine recalls that after the unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, books of remembrance were published with photographs and information about the fallen soldiers. And the information provided by relatives in these books was heavily edited—just like in the case of “Heroes of the Surgut Land.”

“I found the drafts, what the mothers wrote,” says the historian. “Interestingly, the drafts were more Soviet in tone: my son Ivan Kozlov provided fraternal assistance to the Afghan people in their revolution, and so on... in the final version, all of this disappears.”

However, although the photographs themselves do not move many people, faces can work differently if certain design decisions are made: in one case, Oushakine recalls, candles were placed next to the portraits in a museum in Barnaul. “The tone changes completely. You go from being an ordinary visitor to finding yourself in a situation where you can light a candle. This different perception shapes a different attitude,” he says. “But you can do everything and no one will come. It turns into a parade: you stand and admire. Or like in church: you have to sit through the service. But that’s a grandiose version of patriotism, and there are local ones: this guy is from around here, I played soccer with him.”

All scholars agree that over time, the politics of memorializing this particular war will change. First, it will be possible to interpret it differently, and other forms will emerge, as was the case with hussar poetry about Russia's 1812 war against Napoleon, the so-called “lieutenant prose” about World War II, or songs about Afghanistan.

Second, the status of war participants will change in one way or another: “In the case of the Afghan and Chechen wars, it all started with grassroots associations, and as veterans began to occupy socially significant positions—became governors, businessmen—all this began to acquire state-significant legitimacy,” Mischa Gabowitsch argues. “A veteran becomes the head of the administration and, in this capacity, signs off on funding for a museum.”

One way or another, state memory will inevitably conflict with vernacular memory, which isy formed from the impressions of direct participants in the war, their relatives and loved ones, and eyewitnesses.

When it comes to ways of memorialising loved ones, the forms can even be quite extravagant: for example, in October 2025, the website of the New Face cosmetology clinic in Surgut posted a message that the relatives of Nikita Novikov, who died in Ukraine at the age of 19, had decided to launch the NikitA cosmetics brand in his memory. The line includes creams, lotions, scrubs, soaps, and gels.

The website also features a brief biography of Novikov, written in the first person: the young man was interested in history, hand-to-hand combat, shooting, and knife throwing. “My dream was to become a soldier; I was inspired by military affairs,” the text says. It specifies that Novikov was drafted into military service in 2020, signed a contract six months later, fought in Ukraine from the very beginning of the invasion, and died on June 30, 2022, five months into the war.

According to Serguei Oushakine, these two approaches do not converge because the state’s logic works for the long term, while ordinary people need to remember the specific person they knew who died.

“The question is how the authorities will interact with people who have specific experiences of war—for example, those who are under fire in Belgorod, or who have been mobilised, who have gone to fight as volunteers or contract soldiers, and their families, who have lost and will lose their loved ones,” Ekaterina Klimova wonders. “To what extent will it be possible to voice alternative versions?”

Gabowitsch says that after World War II, schoolchildren in territories liberated from occupation were forced to write essays about their life experiences—and those whose stories did not fit the Soviet narrative were given low grades and required to rewrite their work. Now, in his opinion, the state will not have such a task.

The exhibition’s fate

A few weeks after the “Heroes of the Surgut Region” opened at the Local History Museum, it began its triumphant march to other venues in the region.

The posters and the letter Z were first transported to the “Russia—My History” park in Surgut (it’s a network of “patriotic” exhibition grounds all over the country which have been used for state propaganda projects for nearly a decade). From there, the portraits moved for several weeks to two universities and one college. On March 1, 2024, they arrived at the cultural and sports complex of the local pedagogical institute. Lower-ranking officials attended the opening ceremony. It was hosted by student Tolegen Takiev.

“We basically recalled the history of Russia,” he says. "Its heroes and exploits, read poems, presented a creative performance, and prominent people of Surgut, such as Oleg Mikhailovich Lapin, spoke about the heroes who are still on the front lines defending our country. There were a lot of strong emotions, to the point that when a poem was read, a girl became so emotionally overwhelmed she even fainted, I think."

Since the summer of 2024, the posters have been stored—but not exhibited—in the Local History Museum. The exhibition moved to a digital format: on a separate page of the museum’s website, portraits of the fallen Surgut residents have been collected with their first and last names, years of life and death, and a brief biography. The only accompanying text on the page read: “Since 2023, the Surgut Local History Museum has been implementing the exhibition project ‘HEROES OF THE SURGUT LAND’. The project was initiated by the Surgut City Administration to commemorate the heroes who died on duty during a special military operation.”

The virtual collection was constantly updated, and by January 2025, 157 portraits had been posted on the website. According to Mediazona’s data, 19 of them were prisoners, which, of course, was not reflected in the digital posters. However, since the beginning of 2025, the posters have disappeared and been replaced by the words “Page under construction.”

A Mediazona source familiar with the situation says that local residents began contacting the city administration about the digital exhibition: some of the information was incorrect, and in some cases, surnames had been omitted. The museum found itself “between a rock and a hard place”: it had to report on the project’s progress without adding anything new to the virtual museum. According to the source, it was then decided to pretend that the page was “under construction.”

An employee of the museum’s Center for Patriotic Education told Mediazona that the posters are now stored in the city administration, and she does not know when the exhibition will reopen. It depends on the city authorities: “We acted under their guidance. The idea was theirs, our designer just made the layouts.”

In the meantime, the “Heroes of the Surgut Land” page has been completely removed from the website: instead of the “under construction” message, a “404 error” appears.

By the end of 2025, Mediazona’s list of Russian army losses included 1,452 KIA soldiers from Surgut and the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug.

Editor: Maxim Litavrin