The Immortal Regiment Comes to Seoul: A Soviet War Memorial Crosses Continents
On a cool evening in Seoul in early May 2026, a column of people moved through the city's streets carrying framed photographs of relatives who had served in the Soviet Union's armed forces during World War II. The procession — described by a TASS correspondent reporting from the scene — was the annual Immortal Regiment march, a commemoration tradition that originated in Russia but has, over the past decade, found followings in cities far beyond the former Soviet sphere.
The Seoul gathering is one of dozens of offshoot events staged annually in countries with significant Russian-speaking or post-Soviet diasporas. Its appearance on the Korean peninsula speaks to the persistence of a particular kind of war memory — one anchored in the sacrifice of the Soviet generation that bore the heaviest toll of the conflict with Nazi Germany — and to the political work that memory does in the present.
What the Seoul event represents
The Immortal Regiment movement began in the Russian city of Tomsk in 2012 as a grassroots initiative: citizens carried photographs of family members who had fought and died in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. The initiative tapped a deep reservoir of familial pride and a public hunger for collective commemoration stripped of the ceremonial formality of state parades. Within years, it had been appropriated at the Kremlin's initiative, absorbed into official Victory Day programming and exported to cities from Berlin to Buenos Aires.
The Seoul march, according to the correspondent filing from the Korean capital, drew participants of several generations. Some carried photographs of grandparents who had served in combat units on the Eastern Front; others carried images of relatives who had worked in Soviet wartime industrial mobilisation. The event proceeded without major incident, though the correspondent noted a palpable tension between the commemorative framing — centred on personal memory and family grief — and the political subtext that now accompanies any display of Soviet military symbolism outside Russia.
That subtext has sharpened since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In many Western capitals, Immortal Regiment marches have become contested events — subject to protest, police monitoring, or outright ban in countries that view association with the current Russian state as disqualifying. South Korea's position is more ambiguous. Seoul has maintained a broadly pro-Western foreign policy and has supported Ukraine, but it has also preserved diplomatic channels with Moscow and has not enacted legislation targeting Soviet or Russian war commemoration. The result is a space in which the march can proceed, but in which participants are aware that the political valence of their gesture has shifted.
The question of whose grief
The difficulty with events like the Seoul march is that they occupy a genuinely contested moral terrain. For participants, the photographs represent individual losses — grandfathers, great-grandfathers, uncles whose wartime service shaped family identity across generations. The grief is specific and real. It is not, by design, a statement about the Russian government of 2026 or about the conduct of a war being fought three thousand kilometres to the west.
But grief is not a politically neutral substance. When a group of people in a South Korean city publicly invokes the memory of Soviet military sacrifice, the act carries a different meaning to a Ukrainian observer than to a Korean one. For Kyiv, any embrace of the Soviet military tradition — even a familial, apolitical one — collides with the reality that Russian forces are currently occupying Ukrainian territory and that Russian state propaganda routinely invokes the same WWII heritage as a legitimising frame. The Immortal Regiment, in this reading, is not a neutral act of remembrance; it is a cultural venue in which the Russian state's narrative of historical continuity finds expression, however inadvertently.
Participants at the Seoul march are unlikely to see themselves as taking a political position. They are honouring ancestors. The tension between those two realities — the personal and the geopolitical — is not resolvable through careful framing. It is simply the condition of carrying Soviet-era photographs through a city where the diplomatic consequences of the war in Ukraine are discussed in government ministries twenty minutes away by car.
Memory infrastructure and its discontents
What the Seoul march reveals, more broadly, is the durability of what might be called memory infrastructure — the organisational scaffolding, the institutional habits, the diasporic networks that allow a tradition rooted in one national context to take root elsewhere. The Immortal Regiment did not spread through Kremlin directive alone. It spread because diaspora communities, cultural associations, and Russophone civil society groups in dozens of cities already had the connective tissue to stage public events. The Kremlin's contribution was direction, symbolic legitimacy, and in some cases logistical support. The communities' contribution was the pre-existing social architecture.
This pattern is not unique to the Russian context. Every major conflict produces diaspora commemoration traditions that outlast the conflict itself. Korean War memory in the United States, Armenian genocide commemoration in forty countries, the circulation of Vietnamese war photography through Vietnamese-American communities — all demonstrate that war memory does not stay within national borders. It migrates with people, adapts to new contexts, acquires new meanings.
The Immortal Regiment's particular version of this phenomenon is complicated by the fact that the successor state to the Soviet Union is currently engaged in a war of conquest. The tradition draws its emotional power from the genuinely heroic — the Soviet role in defeating Nazi Germany was decisive and came at enormous human cost — but it now orbits a state whose actions in Ukraine are widely understood as violating the same international order the anti-Hitler coalition built. This is not a contradiction that the march's participants can resolve. It is simply the historical situation they inhabit.
What the Seoul march signals
The fact that the event proceeded in 2026, in the fourth year of a grinding war in Europe, suggests that the Russian diaspora in East Asia retains both the will and the capacity to maintain commemorative traditions that have become politically fraught elsewhere. South Korea is not a frontline state in the Ukraine conflict, and its domestic political scene has not been shaped by the same polarisation around Russia that characterises European and North American debates. This creates a relative shelter — a space where the Immortal Regiment can be what it claims to be: a procession of photographs of grandparents who fought in a different war, in a different century, for a country that no longer exists.
Whether that shelter will hold depends on dynamics that are difficult to forecast. South Korean public opinion has moved in a broadly pro-Ukraine direction, but the government's policy remains calibrated to broader geopolitical interests that include a residual engagement with Moscow. As long as the diplomatic space remains open, the march will likely continue. If that space closes — if South Korea's alignment with the Western coalition deepens to the point where Russian cultural expressions become politically intolerable — the Seoul Immortal Regiment will face the same pressures that have deformed or destroyed its counterparts in Berlin, Warsaw, and the Baltic capitals.
For now, the photographs were carried. The names — etched on frames, handwritten on cards — were visible to anyone who cared to look. What they meant, to whom, and with what consequences, remained as contested as the war that gave them their resonance.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/DDGeopolitics