Russia's Night Wolves, Migrating Memory and Europe's Eastern Frontier

In spring of 2015 Central and East European media were preoccupied with a controversial bike tour from Moscow to Berlin. Russia’s best-known biker club, the Night Wolves organized it to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of Victory Day (May 9) that marks the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. The so-called victory tour divided European public opinion, raising important questions about European borders, which had lately come under serious strain, and the politics of World War II commemoration. The paper argues that the international public discourse around the Night Wolves illuminates how European borders are being transformed both as hard, territorialized borders and as “soft”, symbolic boundaries. The analysis compares how print and online media in Russia, Poland, and Germany – the countries in which significant border disputes over the entry of the group ensued – framed the Night Wolves’ tour across Europe. It focuses on the construction of borders as a narrative project and maps the symbolic boundary drawing strategies mobilized by various actors. It shows the sharply contrasting understandings of the Russian bikers’ commemorative journey: Poles view the bikers’ rally integral to Russia’s contemporary “hybrid war”, Germans see it as a way to instrumentalize World War II memory for Russian propaganda, while Russians accuse the European Union of applying double moral standards when refusing entry to bikers with valid visas. By focusing on mobility and border crossings, the paper develops a transnational perspective to memory politics and highlights the role of non-governmental organizations in shaping new repertoires of nationalism.