This article examines the symbolic politics of three pro-state movements that emerged from the “preventive counterrevolution” launched by the Kremlin in response to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. In 2005, youth movement Nashi played upon war memory at its rallies and branded the opposition “fascist”; in 2012, the Anti-Orange Committee countered opposition protests with mass gatherings at Moscow’s war commemoration sites; in 2015, Antimaidan brought thousands onto Russia’s streets to denounce US-backed regime change and alleged neo-Nazism in Kiev. I show how evocation of the enemy image, through reference to the war experience, played a key role in the symbolism of the preventive counterrevolution. Interviews with activists in these movements discussing their symbolic politics reveal an opposing victim/victor narrative based on an interplay of two World War II myths—the “Great Victory” and the “fascist threat.” Moving beyond approaches that view the Soviet and Russian World War II cult as a triumphalist narrative of the Great Victory over fascism, I conclude that its threat component is an understudied element.

The article explores ways in which the nineteenth-century Prussian military architecture has been used and promoted as a part of the local heritage in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Accommodation of the old fortification buildings to tourism and museum work has been publicly discussed since the beginning of the 2000s, but neither local nor federal authorities have proposed a plan to adapt them to non-military purposes. As a result, these structures, which are protected by federal heritage laws and uniformly built of characteristic red bricks, have become an arena for various initiatives, experiments, and games with the past. Strategies of virtualization discussed in the paper reveal a lack of open public discussion about dark episodes of Russian and Soviet history. Consequently, it is important to learn more about how and why contemporary Kaliningraders appropriate the local German legacies, use globally accepted strategies of heritage construction, and develop cooperation with the EU countries, while remaining receptive to official historical narratives promulgated by the national center.