Conclusion

Summary

This book aimed to produce a series of close readings of a limited number of case studies in the sacrificial discourse while paying careful attention to the nuances of rhetoric, imagery, and narrative. By doing so, I hoped to identify a trajectory of the sacrificial topos, which continues to provide a strong gravitational zone for various discourses. Today, the language of sacrifice and heroic victimization no longer belongs to the official discourse alone; the intelligentsia, popular culture in the form of talk shows, forums, and flash mobs, as well as government officials all occasionally borrow from its dramatic arsenal. The old models of heroism are still being discussed, in addition to their brand-new incarnations.

One of the most vivid recent examples of sacrificial language appeared on television in July 2014, when the Russian state's TV Channel One ran a story about a little boy crucified by the advancing Ukrainian Army in the eastern city of Slaviansk during the recent conflict with the separatists of Donetsk People's Republic. The video segment featured an interview with an eyewitness, Galina Pyshniak, who described a scene familiar from wartime narratives about the execution of captured partisans: the whole town was gathered in the city square and forced to watch as the little boy bled to death. The story was widely discredited and proclaimed a fake; even Channel One eventually had to admit that they did not have any evidence that this horrific event ever took place. What is interesting about the little boy's story is the ways in which it both resembles and deviates from the standard World War II narrative of victimization. Much like the latter, it stokes anger against the enemy (Ukraine) and rallies the Russian public around the figure of the victim. The method of execution as well as its voyeuristic nature both indicate that this is meant to be a tale of martyrdom on par with the wartime stories, though more religiously overt, and the witness's narrative contains many obvious references to the atrocities committed by Germans in Soviet territories.