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The article summarizes the results of a case study undertaken with the help of non-participant observation in January 2020 in South Africa. Three memorial sites have been observed: the Apartheid Museum, the Liliesleaf Farm Museum and the Voortrekker Monument. Data collection and analysis have allowed identifying the ideological and evaluative content of the expositions of museums that serve the purpose of commemorating the traumatic past of South Africa, and tracing their relationship with other commemorative narratives and the evolution of historical policy in the 20th -21st centuries. The authors draw parallels with some elements of Soviet domestic and, in particular, national policy, which, without declaring segregation goals directly, engendered similar consequences, and became evaluated as encouraging ethnic particularism in the post-Soviet period. The article concludes that in all cases in question, representations of collective trauma and armed struggle fulfill a legitimizing function, justifying the rights of ethnic and racial groups to the territory and nation building. In general, museum displays and memorials dedicated to apartheid and commemorating events related to state building represent South African society as deeply divided.

The authors propose a typology of sites of memory of political repressions that took place in different periods of Russian history, which emerged under the influence of a set of historical, social and cultural factors. The purpose of the study is to trace the logic of the formation of specific types of monuments, including those existing in the form of the so-called counter-monuments, in the process of implementing the politics of memory and formulating ideas about the traumatic past. The authors used the chronotopic method of examining sites of memory in a number of regions of Russia, such as the memorial complex Perm-36, multiple sites of commemoration at the Bolshoy Solovetsky Island, places of memory at the Rybinsk water reservoir, the Butovo polygon, memorial objects in the Saratov region, and the Republic of Mordovia, architectural constructions in the Russian Far East, etc. Theoretically, the research is rooted in the concept of "memory sites" proposed by Pierre Nora and understood as a combination of material and spiritual elements of culture that carry a symbolic load associated with understanding the social past. The authors demonstrate the presence of several types of memorial sites. It turned out that in the Russian domain of memory about the political repressions there are no sites that meet the criteria of a traditional monument. Conditionally traditional monuments can be territorially localized (solitary or complex) or dispersed (standard or heterogeneous). The second type of monuments is defined as hybrid, including vernacular, alternative and palimpsest varieties. Vernacular monuments are determined by their agents of construction, while the alternative ones are associated with specific interpretations of the past and can be supplemented with new constructive elements in the course of existence, palimpsests imply the explicit or hidden presence of many symbolically loaded layers. Counter-monuments constitute a special type represented by walking, landscape, ecological, and disappearing monuments. They are characterized as performative and participatory. The presence of different types of monuments proves not so much the absence of a unified strategy of commemoration in Russian society, but rather the fact that multiple social groups participate in the process of commemoration, producing heterogeneous and polyphonic monuments.