In December 2023, Sofia’s monument to the Soviet army was partially dismantled, 30 years after the local city council voted to remove or demolish it. Built in 1954 to commemorate the Red Army’s entry into Nazi-occupied Bulgaria a decade earlier, it is the city’s tallest monument, topped by a Red Army soldier raising a rifle as a battalion charges. For the Soviets, it is a symbol of liberation, but for Bulgarian Democratic MP Ivaylo Mirchev, among others, it is “a symbol of occupation” that now “goes to the past, where it belongs. “
Since the end of the Soviet satellite regime in 1989, the people of Sofia have reinvented the monument in a variety of ways. Skateboarders and punks gather around; Sofia Pride used it as a meeting point. In 2011, the anonymous art collective Destructivo Creation painted the foot soldiers at the monument as popular American fictional characters, adding Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and Ronald McDonald, as an observation on the post-Soviet Westernization of Bulgaria (the subject of a short documentary by Anton Partalev). Two years later, artists painted the foot soldiers pink to excuse Bulgaria’s role in crushing the Prague Spring in 1968. They were painted yellow and blue in 2014 to help the Maidan revolution, and then in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Where the afterlife is and what it looks like is not only a practical question, but also a philosophical one. The driving cause behind the resolution on the Sofia statue appears to have been the revelation that the tech entrepreneur-turned-possible or Vasil Terziev’s parents were members of the Bulgarian secret service, possibly prompting Terziev to dedicate a manifesto to remove the statue permanently. However, debates among the former Warsaw Pact countries over the fate of their Soviet monuments have been in full swing since 1989.
Should they be destroyed in order to definitively deny the communist afterlife of the countries?Would keeping them in their position mean celebrating this history, or ensuring that this era – with all its corruptions of Marx and Engels’ vision of communism – is forgotten?Is there an appropriate commitment to move monuments to places that are less visible, but still available to the public, such as museums?If so, who manages those spaces and what is their tone?
On these questions, the Sophians are divided. In an October 2023 poll, 30. 7% voted in favor of keeping the Red Army Monument; 22 per cent for demolition; and 27. 8% moved it to a museum. But the Museum of Socialist Art, founded by the government in 2011, does not have the capacity to place the monument in its sculpture garden, and the government would possibly be concerned that it remains a site of protest and vandalism. Instead, they opted for the temporary solution of knocking down the soldiers, who lately have been sitting at the foot of the monument’s fence, waiting for their next destination. As a friend in Sofia told me, this can also lead to their recovery, something that would be unprecedented in the former Soviet bloc.
Some of those countries have chosen to address this problematic heritage by creating open-air museums for some of those monuments, adopting tones. The sculpture park of the Bulgarian Museum of Socialist Art is encouraged by similar projects in Eastern Europe, which closely resemble the lawn of the Estonian History Museum, filled with Lenin, Stalin and leaders of the Estonian SSR . Estonia’s sculpture park is more an anti-imperialist than an anti-socialist gesture: in Tallinn as in Riga, in neighboring Latvia, the monuments of the proletarian uprising of 1905 remain in the city center, since in the city center only the monuments to the other people who participated in the proletarian uprising of 1905. The Red Army, the Bolshevik revolutionary vanguard or the Soviet government were transferred to the Museum. There is a certain sadness on Tallinn’s graveyard-like lawn, with Matti Varik’s giant bust of Lenin and Martin Saks’ bust of Estonian Bolshevik revolutionary Jaan Anvelt on the ground, and Aleksandr Kaasik’s statue of Bolshevik revolutionary Mikhail Kalinin without a hand. .
This technique is different from that adopted in Hungary, one of the first post-socialist states to install its monuments in a museum. The Memento Park opened in a former sports stadium on the outskirts of Budapest on June 29, 1993, two years after Soviet times. The troops left Hungary and were criticized by the regime’s survivors, especially through the remarkable Stalinist iteration of 1945-1956, who felt that the statues deserved to be destroyed and that the theme park’s concept and marketing were too frivolous. about the dictatorship,” replied architect Ákos Eleöd. At the same time, it is a question of democracy. After all, only democracy is capable of. . . to think freely about the dictatorship. “
The centerpiece of the park is the remains of the massive statue of Stalin demolished to the boot during the Hungarian uprising of 1956; There are also several monuments to Béla Kun, who ruled the short-lived independent Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. There’s sardonic humor in Memento Park, which celebrates the regime’s collapse not by demolishing its relics, but by inviting tourists to take selfies. However, some stories are more than cheerful: the brutal Stalinist leader Mátyas Rákosi and Janos Kádár, who betrayed Imre Nagy and other leaders of the 1956 uprising before presiding over a less draconian regime until 1988, are conspicuously absent from the list. park. A permanent exhibition on Soviet Hungary curated through Memento Park in 2007 expressed the tension between his ironic attitude, those who have a certain nostalgia for the socialist era, and those who sought to have their memory erased.
English filmmaker Peter Watkins does the same about Grūtas Park in Lithuania: the sculpture garden founded in 2001 as his own company, from the private collection of communist statues of local businessman Viliumas Malinaukskas, acquired at an affordable price ten years earlier, in 2003’s Deiguytas Narkevičius film. The role of a lifetime. ” For a lot of Lithuanians, it’s a crisis to put those statues of those killers in a jungle setting with birds singing,” Watkins says, “but I’m sure others see it as a crisis. ” It is an opportunity to reflect on the incredible madness and insolence of man and the never-ending, sadly, repetition of history.
The creation of the Grutas Park was controversial; Malinauskas wasn’t allowed to send visitors on a gulag-style train, she was allowed to come with recreations of the camps with watchtowers and barbed-rope fences (bland as it sounds, it’s worth noting that this, combined with with the KGB Museum in Vilnius represents much more than fidelity to Lithuania’s Nazi profession or local collaboration with it, an imbalance also discovered in Tallinn and Riga. )
Another film by Narkevičius, Once in the Twentieth Century (2004), inverts photographs of cheerful citizens observing the removal of a monument to Lenin in 1991 to make it look like it is being installed: an observation about the joy many feel when such statues are seen. they were destroyed, but also in the nostalgia for communism that has become more prevalent as the promises of market capitalism have been shown to be false (the disillusionment embodied in Farewell, Lenin!, through Wolfgang Becker).
The spectacle of the removal of these monuments caught the attention of the West, which reveled in its victory in the Cold War; however, in some parts of the USSR, many remained in place. Visiting them is now a melancholy experience.
Bishkek, now the capital of Kyrgyzstan, existed before 1917, but the Soviets renamed it Frunze after Bolshevik army leader Mikhail Frunze, who was born there. In a referendum in March 1991, 88. 7% voted in favor of Kyrgyzstan (as then) remaining part of the USSR, but secessionist forces still achieved independence.
The new government changed the name of the capital to Bishkek and replaced the central square of Lenin Square with Ala-Too Square (named after the nearby mountain). For the rest, it has preserved not only Soviet architecture but also its monuments. National Museum in the main square, but almost everything else remained in place: even the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the celebrated founder of the Soviet secret police, remained in place until 1999.
This is in stark contrast to the “decommunization” in Ukraine that followed the 2014 revolution, in which the statue of Lenin was toppled in Kiev. The new legislation aimed to remove the “symbols” of fascism and communism, but in practice they were implemented almost exclusively for the latter, with the notable exception of World War II memorials (some are too giant to be dismantled, notably the monument to the fatherland in Kiev, completed in 1981, higher than the nearby Pechersk Lavra Cathedral). After the war escalated in February 2022 and anti-USSR sentiment rose in the former Soviet bloc, and the hammer and sickle on the statue’s shield were replaced by the Ukrainian trident.
But as those monuments are removed elsewhere, after careful consideration of the implications in conversion contexts, in Russia they are being replaced by crude belligerence. Putin rejects the USSR’s communist ideology, but not its imperialism or Russian authoritarianism, and a new A statue of Dzerzhinsky was recently unveiled outside the headquarters of foreign intelligence facilities in Moscow. The replacement of monuments has also been an act of aggression (hardly passive): Maria Kapajeva’s film, Forced Memory, shows how a tank installed in Narva to commemorate World War II was brought to an end in August 2022 after the Estonian government followed decommunization policies similar to those in Ukraine. The giant Russian network in Estonia opposed the decision. A month later, the Russians installed a reproduction of a monument in Ivangorod, on the Estonian side of the border.
These debates were organized this way because the Soviet Union dissolved after the overthrow of its satellite regimes. Monuments have also been the subject of debate, direct action and entitlement in the UK, from the Rhodes Must Fall campaign to the statue’s topple. from the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, to the panic unleashed by the attacks on the statue of Sir Winston Churchill in Parliament Square or on the Cenotaph in Whitehall, largely invented to galvanise the far right to attack Black Lives Matter and later Palestine. protesters, respectively. The difference here is that there has never been a decisive break with the company that produced Rhodes or Colston.
The Commons and Lords would prefer that other people not deviate from the official narrative of the UK’s benevolence in abolishing slavery by emphasizing the vital role British merchants played in the human trade; the extent to which the United Kingdom benefited from colonial extraction; or that the government paid millions in reimbursement to slave owners, but nothing to slaves. If conservatives were to get rid of monuments to settlers and slave owners, would they have to pay reparations to the descendants of their victims?Or the former colonies? Which characters and occasions in their valuable edition of British history do they repudiate, and how many would be direct ancestors of our current parliamentarians or their journalist clients?
None of those problems can be tolerated, so we get the opposite of decommunization. In reaction to Colston’s action, the government introduced new legislation to “protect the ancient and cultural heritage of England”, with “individuals wishing to remove a historic statue, whether indexed or not” requiring “planning permission or building permit”. Commentators complained that Colston’s self-proclaimed detractors have “followed the right channels. “As one local put it, “you’re on the right track now. “
Communities Secretary and existing buffoon, Robert Jenrick, said such measures were aimed at preventing “worthy alarm clockers” from cutting down monuments “at the behest of a delusional mob” and, with the deception inherent in any right-wing debate on freedom in his speech, said that “we cannot, and we cannot, attempt to adjust or censor our past. “For others like Jenrick, it’s about stifling a fair verbal exchange on the basis of the UK, and that goes hand in hand with attacks on anti-colonial academics, all as part of an attempt to silence critics of British foreign policy. Past and present.
Perhaps 30 years from now, statues of Sir Robert Geffrye, James Cook and others will follow the same path as those of Lenin and Stalin in the former Soviet bloc. For now, the Monument to Good Muslims has tasked us with diverting attention from the endemic Islamophobia of the Conservative Party and its B-team, the Labour right, not to mention its demand for genocide in Gaza, and the endless blatant nonsense about Churchill’s statue being drowned. Perhaps we can come to an agreement and move them around. All on the sculpture lawn of a new museum of British imperialism?
Juliet Jacques is a writer, filmmaker, animator, and academic.
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