Demolishing a Distorted Past

National Review Online, May 22, 2022

Victory Memorial, Riga, August 2009 @ Andrew Stuttaford

Conquerors like to remind the conquered of who is in charge. One way of doing so is by the construction of monuments, symbols of the new order — and by their permanence, of its permanence. The Soviets were no exception to this rule, distinguishing themselves only by the ugliness and, not infrequently, the gigantism of the works they fashioned. Not far enough from the center of the Latvian capital, Riga, there’s an archetypal example of this genre: overbearing, grandiloquent, and brutal. It dates from the later years of the Soviet occupation, a time when the Kremlin was using memories of the “Great Patriotic War” to bolster a regime struggling to deal with ideological failure, economic stagnation, and growing disaster in Afghanistan.

Victory Memorial, Riga, August 2009 @ Andrew Stuttaford

Formally the “Monument to the Liberators of Soviet Latvia and Riga from the German Fascist Invaders,” this bleak, decaying totalitarian shrine is more usually referred to as the Victory Monument (more concise, less confrontational), at least by its fans or those who cannot be bothered with either the actively pejorative or passively negative (the “Soviet monument”). In a recent speech on plans to demolish it, Latvia’s President Egils Levits opted for the former, calling the monument “the object left by the Soviet Russians in Pārdaugava.”

That object is located in Riga’s Victory Park, a park that was given back its name when the monument was erected (after a spell in which it had been catchily named after the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Originally, the victory in question was Latvian, won during the country’s war of independence, a victory that was now, almost literally, concreted over.

To many of Riga’s “Russian-speakers” (a term used in the Baltic states that encompasses the settlers from elsewhere in the USSR who arrived during the Soviet years, and their descendants), the monument is a suitable salute to the triumph over the Third Reich that remains a source of pride and, for some, vanished glory. But to most ethnic Latvians, the “Occupation Monument,” as an MP described it to me last month, is an insult.

Like neighboring Estonia and Lithuania, Latvia had been forcibly incorporated into the USSR in 1940, part of the spoils of Stalin’s pact with Hitler. When the Germans invaded their erstwhile Soviet accomplices in 1941, they overran and then occupied the Baltic states, until, in due course, the Red Army drove them out. That returned the trio to Moscow’s grim “union” for a second, far more prolonged taste of what that meant, including, notoriously, the killings, jailings, terms in the Gulag, and mass deportations that characterized the early phases of a reoccupation that lasted nearly a half century and, in Latvia’s case, ended with ethnic Latvians only just remaining the majority in their own country. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that they want to be rid of a complex (the monument consists of an obelisk and a series of statues) built to celebrate the opening act of a fresh national catastrophe.

For many Russian-speakers, the complex had become not only a focal point for commemorations of wartime victory (attendance could run into six figures), but a place that was theirs, an assertion of their continuing presence in Latvia and, with it, a vision of modern Latvia, whether colonial, post-colonial, or a fusion of both, that ethnic Latvians do not share and never will. It’s telling that the Latvian president’s arguments for removing the monument concern the future as well as the past.

The meaning of a monument can evolve over time. The functions filled by the object Levits labels a “Kremlin propaganda facility” now include, he maintains, acting as a public display of support for the notion of a “Russian world.” This “world,” a concept promoted by Putin and condemned, reasonably enough, by Levits as “imperialist,” rests upon the idea of a murkily defined Russian “space” even larger than Russia itself. Within it, the argument runs, Moscow may have the right to assist, one way or another, threatened “compatriots” beyond its borders, such as the Baltics’ supposedly bullied Russian-speakers. The implications of that are not hard to work out.

Up until now, the monument, an ineffective bombing attack aside, has been left untouched. For years it had been protected under the provisions of a 1994 agreement between Russia and Latvia. Not only that, for most of the last decade, Riga’s city government had been controlled by Harmony, a party dominated by Russian-speakers (Russians became the largest ethnic group in Riga during the Soviet occupation, and Russian-speakers still account for a substantial portion of the city’s population), who would not have cooperated with any plans to take the monument down.

Even without either of those obstacles, successive Latvian governments might have hesitated before proceeding down a route that might have triggered not only inter-ethnic trouble at a time when the country’s demographic balance was even trickier than it is now but also risked significant reprisals from Russia. In 2007, Estonia had moved the Soviet “Monument to the Liberators of Tallinn,” a statue of a Red Army soldier, the “Bronze Soldier” sometimes dubbed Alyosha, from Tallinn’s center to its military cemetery. Preparations for the transfer led to two nights of rioting, followed by massive cyberattacks from Russia.

The Bronze Soldier, Tõnismägi, Tallinn, August 1993 Ⓒ Andrew Stuttaford

The Broze Soldier, Tallinn Military Cemetery, May 2022 Ⓒ Andrew Stuttaford

The war in Ukraine has hardened attitudes. As Rihards Kols, a prominent Latvian MP, put it: “Changed geopolitical conditions . . . mean that Latvia can’t and won’t be bound to preserve . . . monuments to the Soviet occupation.” By a margin of 68–18 (the 18 were mainly drawn from Harmony), Latvia’s parliament voted to suspend the relevant part (Article 13) of the 1994 agreement.

The suspension, reported Latvian Public Broadcasting, will continue “until Russia terminates breaches of international law with regard to Ukraine, including the removal of its armed forces from the territory of Ukraine and the full restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, in line with the requirements of international law, and the full reimbursement for the crimes already committed.”

That sounds permanent to me.

Kols stressed that suspending Article 13 would not affect burial grounds. The Red Army dead will be left in peace, as they should be, but the Victory Monument is in a park, not a graveyard.

After the vote in Parliament, Riga’s city council felt free to approve the dismantling of the monument, and Latvians felt free to contribute to a fund to help pay for the work. Within two days, the fund had reportedly received €200,000 in donations. Access to the complex, some of which had recently been fenced off as “unsafe” (neglect has its uses), has now been restricted.

That this monument marks Soviet success in the Second World War only increases the chances of a sharp response from Moscow or its proxies. The Kremlin’s cynical use of that war in the later Soviet era has been echoed, and perhaps even amplified, under Putin, a key part of a wider project to again rewrite history, but this time in a way designed to pull together the conflicting strands — czars and commissars together  — of Russia’s past into a single patriotic narrative.

And thus far, it has worked well. It’s why Putin can talk about “denazifying” Ukraine and find an audience. It’s also why today’s Baltic states have regularly been smeared as nests of fascists, neo-Nazis, or the like, propaganda made easier to swallow by the murderous role played by Baltic “willing executioners” in the Holocaust, particularly in Latvia and Lithuania, as well as by the unwanted decision imposed on many in Latvia and Estonia, who, feeling compelled to choose between totalitarian occupiers (when they actually had a choice: a good number were conscripted, including one of the monument’s two sculptors, a fact that would normally have ruled out much of a career in the USSR), opted for Germany. Pulling down the Victory Monument will bolster, albeit undeservedly, Putin’s efforts to conjure up the specters of the Second World War.

There have been protests in Riga by Russian-speakers opposed to the proposed dismantling as well as a demonstration outside the Latvian embassy in Moscow. I doubt things will stop there. The complex’s huge size makes matters worse. Its central obelisk is around 250-feet high, and it is accompanied by several giant figures, one of “Mother Motherland,” and three of Red Army men, the latter towering evidence that the overlap between the 20th century’s various totalitarian cults extended to the arts.

By contrast, Tallinn’s Alyosha is far from triumphalist: The Bronze Soldier’s head is bowed in mourning, and the whole figure is only some six-and-a-half feet tall. He and the structure in which he stood were easy enough to move quickly, and the cemetery in which he now resides is an appropriate location: the last resting place of service personnel from many militaries, including those of the USSR. All the graves are treated with a respect that was, for those who had fought on an ideologically incorrect side, denied during the Soviet years. To be sure, Alyosha was vandalized in early April (one of his medals was ground down), but when I was there at the beginning of May, the damage had already been repaired. The Bronze Soldier still stood, bouquets of flowers at his feet, under the watchful eyes of an Estonian security guard.

Demolishing the Victory Monument will take quite some time and, presumably, will involve some very heavy equipment. It has the potential to become a spectacle and, given the fighting in Ukraine, at a dangerous, sensitive moment. Mischief-makers in Moscow could not ask for more.

Meanwhile the Baltic monument wars will continue elsewhere, just one front in the long-standing effort to define the identities of these lands by changing how the past is reflected in their landscape. After the Baltic states were annexed, the Soviets destroyed, with a couple of unlikely exceptions, almost anything honoring the republics’ inter-war independence. Many of these have now been rebuilt, and many of their Soviet successors have been torn down. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means that the pace of clearing away the remnants will pick up. Among this month’s pending or completed removals in Latvia are three “commemorative stones” in Jelgava, a city to the west of Riga. Dismantling monuments of the Soviet occupation would, reckoned the local council, honor the sovereignty of the Latvian state and “tidy the area.” Right on both counts.