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Abstract: Generalissimo Suvorov - An Abortive Attempt to Create a Hero in Late Tsarist Russia
By the time the Russian Field-Marshal Alexander Suvorov died in 1800, he was widely acknowledged to be a military hero. This was for the most part due to his reputation of never having lost a battle. Suvorov had been elevated to the rank of a count of "Rymnik", named after the location of one of his victories in what is today Rumania, and in 1799 to the rank of "kniaz' Italiiskii" (a prince of Italy), while at the same time he had been promoted to the highest military rank of generalissimo. Immediately after his death a figurative monument on Petersburg's Field of Mars was erected to honour him. Together with his comrades-in-arms of the "golden" age of Catherine II, Rumiantsev and Potemkin, Suvorov fell into partial oblivion due to the Patriotic War (1812-1815), Russian officers of the general staff commemorated him when the centenary of his Italian and Swiss campaigns approached. The centenary triggered manifold activities and intellectual events which continued well into the First World War. During these two decades of heroic remembrance, the
Empire, its military leadership, and a number of intellectual bourgeois civilians established a heroized image of Suvorov that stood apart from that of other Russian military leaders. As a result of the Great War, heroization was in the end less than fully successful; this article focuses however on efforts to heroize Suvorov during this fertile period.
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Versuche zur Heroisierung historischer Heldenfiguren waren keine russische Besonderheit des späten Zarenreichs, sondern sind im Kontext des allgemeineuropäischen Nationalismus zu sehen. Das Russische Reich hat auch hier eine in Westeuropa schon früher einsetzende Entwicklung nachgeholt. Die im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert als Reaktion auf nationalistische Strömungen unternommenen Ansätze zur Nationalisierung des Imperiums1 führten zusammen mit der panslawistisch aufgeladenen Stimmung um die Jahrhundertwende dazu, dass Heldengestalten der russischen Vergangenheit für patriotische Zwecke neu figuriert wurden. Im Folgenden soll am Beispiel der Aktualisierung des Feldherrn Aleksandr Vasil'evic Suvorov anlässlich der einhundertsten Wiederkehr seines Italien- und Alpenzugs von 1799 sowie seines Todes (am 6. Mai 1800 alten Stils) untersucht werden, wie um 1900 versucht wurde, über die Erinnerung an einen Kriegshelden des 18. Jahrhunderts Identität und...