Until now, we have considered questions which, at least in principle, relate to substantive ‘facts’ about communal circumstances, attributes, or activities: questions of history and geography, of ideology and religion, of language, music, and the conditions of life. However, in several cases we have also seen how, in cultural practice, discourse on national identity often functions as much through symbols as through articulated discussion of the ‘real’ question. Identity may be affirmed or contested through a shared language of signs (flags, pictures, verbal slogans, songs, names, labels, and so on) as much as through ‘real’ shared practices or qualities. In the final section of the book we turn to such signs themselves, no longer as adjuncts to a thematic discussion. Indeed, one of the strongest points to have emerged is the polyvalence of the signs, the ways in which they have been invested with multiple meanings by those who have used them: as if a shared identity can be maintained through the constant use of agreed signifiers, almost regardless of what is supposed to be signified by them.

Chapter 10 deals with public monuments which have come to acquire this kind of emblematic status. The first section of the chapter is partly a historical survey of such monuments, but partly also an account of the very idea of a public monument in Russia, drawing on the evidence of relatively under-used sources such as guide-books.