Landscapes of Communism

8 Memorial

Every dictatorship, whether of man or of party, leads to the forms that schizophrenia loves most: the monologue and the mausoleum. Moscow [is] full of gagged people and monuments to the revolution.

Octavio Paz¹

MONUMENTS WITHOUT BEARDS

Not long after the nationalization of land, the publication of all secret treaties and other more obviously contentious moves, the new communist government in the former Russian Empire decreed a ‘call for monumental propaganda’. This was not the action of a government confident of its longevity. Lenin, famously and uncharacteristically, broke into a little dance on the day that the Petrograd Commune of 1917 outlasted the couple of months or so that was allowed to the Paris Commune in 1871; each subsequent day was counted as ‘Commune plus one’, ‘Commune plus two’, and so forth, until it began to run into months and years. The Commune, with its close participation from aesthetes like Gustave Courbet and Arthur Rimbaud, may have had some ideas about constructing monuments of its own, but it is much better known for toppling them – the Vendôme Column, most notoriously, as a monument to imperialism and absolute power – for which crime Courbet was held personally responsible. The idea of ‘monumental propaganda’ was an attempt at leaving something ostensibly permanent, at least more so than the temporary ‘street art of the revolution’ – albeit in the awareness that counter-revolution would remove the results as soon as it could.

The approach they took was perhaps more prosaic than the actual ideas themselves – busts and small statues of various bearded men, usually made from plaster due to the shortage of materials caused by civil war and international blockade; but the choice was impressively eclectic. Marx and Engels, of course, but also Robespierre, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, part of a list that combined practically every possible revolutionary hero, whether they were politician or poet, follower of the current General Line or not. As for the aesthetic, most were pretty traditional, though a Cubo-Futurist bust of Bakunin was part of the programme. Needless to say, none were of living leaders – no Lenins, no Trotskys, certainly no Stalins. The only sculptural survivor of this immediate post-revolutionary euphoria doesn’t feature a human visage at all: it’s a rock on the Field of Mars in St Petersburg, with an inscription commemorating the very few who died in the seizure of power.

‘Monument’ and ‘memorial’ are generally synonymous, denoting objects that try to speak of the past, whether in a heroic or mournful register. In this sense, they’re a matter of memory. But if this 1918 programme for monumental propaganda is remembered at all, it is for its most implausible proposal, which unlike the others never spent a year or two decorating a Petrograd or Moscow street – Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. We’ve encountered this already, this most famous unbuilt project of revolutionary communism. It was, strictly speaking, a building rather than a piece of monumental sculpture, but Tatlin so loaded it with symbolic content that it was intended to serve as a more true monument and embodiment of the revolution than the various ossified figures of Great Men, this new form of socialist idolatry. It would be socialist in its content, by housing the Communist International in their daily business of setting the world aflame; it would also be socialist in its form, riven with symbols that had reference only to the political movement to which it was dedicated, given that the rotating glass volumes inside the spiralling steel structure were intended to ‘literally’ embody revolution and the dialectic. Tatlin knew all of this was impossible – notoriously, there wasn’t enough steel in Russia to construct it; nor was there even enough in Petrograd at that point to build a steel model, so it was pieced together in wood, instead, before being exhibited at the House of Trade Unions. What it was, was a statement about memorials themselves, and about their architectural form. It is iconoclasm, in the original sense. In the new society, it demands, we should not go on creating statues of great men – to do so would be ill-fitting for the egalitarian society we want to create. Instead we will build structures that will be both abstract and symbolic, high tech and dreamlike, revolutionary and playful – as was noticed, Tatlin’s tower closely resembled a helter-skelter. They will encapsulate a new kind of city. Nothing built hitherto even approached the spatial extravagance, the wild revolutionary spectacle, of this monument; if it had been built where intended, on the Neva in the centre of St Petersburg, the entire city would have been refocused on and transformed by it. It was not static, either, not a fixed piece of architecture made from heavy masonry: it rotated, it moved, it broadcast calls to revolution across Europe from the radio mast at its peak. Mayakovsky caught it best when he called it ‘the first monument without a beard’.²

It is some measure of the failure of these early revolutionary hopes that thousands upon thousands of monuments with beards (and moustaches) were constructed across the ‘socialist countries’. Were it not for Mao’s clean-shaven visage, we could talk about tens of thousands. Yet of all the constructions left by the self-described communist regimes, few are so obvious (or so intriguing) to the foreign visitor, or so enduringly controversial in those countries themselves, as the memorials and monuments that communism erected to itself. They face a difficult, ambiguous fate. First of all, those which have survived in their original place are few and far between in the former Eastern Bloc, and have been pared down in the former USSR as well. What endures is a strange ragbag, and it doesn’t always endure for the reasons one might expect. Stalins were the first to go, in the 1960s, except, notoriously, for a few in Georgia, particularly, as we shall see, in his hometown of Gori; there have even been occasional new Stalins erected at the hands of the reactionary Communist Parties of Russia or Ukraine – one was built in 2010 in the Ukrainian industrial city of Zaporizhia. In all of the countries that are now part of the European Union, the once ubiquitous Lenins have disappeared, as have the various local communist leaders who were once immortalized, from the Latvian Pēteris Stučka to the Hungarian Béla Kun or the Pole Julian Marchlewski; communists who were victims of Stalin were removed along with loyal Stalinists like Klement Gottwald. Communists survive better, in fact, in the former GDR, as a partial consequence of its annexation by a Western country with a Marxist tradition – so in (East) Berlin, Leipzig or Chemnitz (the former ‘Karl-Marx-Stadt’) the Marxes and Engelses are inviolate. Counterintuitively, some of the most common survivals in terms of monumental propaganda are the most ‘Stalinist’ complexes in form – the numerous Monuments to the Red Army which were left in liberated cities after 1945, many of which still have inscriptions from Stalin himself. These largely survive as part of an informal agreement with Gorbachev when pulling the Red Army out in 1990, that these large-scale ensembles, often on the site of mass graves, would be retained as a mark of respect to the more than 20 million Soviet citizens who were killed. Which is more than fair, although their strikingly authoritarian, often Socialist Realist form is a reminder of why that liberation was not universally welcomed.

The monuments that do survive, and can be visited – and which are frequently far from ruined, often even having fresh flowers left on them – are usually on the most ruthless, domineering scale, deliberately despotic. Huge soldier-supermen gesticulate and lunge, skyscraping mothers wave swords aloft, concrete escarpments become ritual ziggurats and temples, and eternal flames burn (or, in many cases, don’t burn) at the heart of them. Their scale, with their large plazas, steps and other ceremonial spaces, is not conducive to all the things a capitalist city should have – movement, shopping, adverts, footfall, as they call it. As a result, some are unexpectedly cherished. The Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova writes that ‘while the monumental evidence from the communist period is clearly diminishing, it is more noticeable now when its presence is not mandated. It is acquiring the status of the formerly cherished pre-communist monuments.’ Those pre-revolutionary monuments, like the Freedom Monument in Riga, were loved because they were a reminder that something other than Soviet domination was possible. Do Soviet monuments, conversely, contain within them some suggestion that – muscles, beards, guns and all – something other than capitalism is possible?

EMBALMING THE REVOLUTION: THREE MAUSOLEA

Rather than spaces of possibility, the most intense ritual spaces of ‘real socialism’ are closed off, literally deathly. They form perhaps the best architectural argument for the hackneyed thesis that the USSR was a strange industrial spin on ‘oriental despotism’, where leaders of revolutions that were intended to do away with all hierarchy, all cults of personal power, were treated as if they were pharaohs. Typically, the magic was achieved via advanced technology. Lenin was embalmed, not mummified. This way, a ritual was created, whereby people would queue outside the mausoleum, then file around the sacred body – placed, incidentally, in a polygonal glass coffin designed by Konstantin Melnikov – then leave, having ‘seen’ Lenin. This happened against the will of Lenin’s family – his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his sister, Maria Ulyanova – and of many in the Party, including Trotsky. The process by which the decision was made is murky, but it appears to have been an improvised reaction by the Soviet leadership around Grigori Zinoviev to the unexpected mass outpouring of grief at Lenin’s death. Suddenly, an insecure government realized that they were popular.

Lenin’s mausoleum has been claimed by some – cartographer of Constructivism Richard Pare, for instance – as the foundational building of Stalinist architecture, and by others as one of the last works of the avant-garde. The first, temporary mausoleum was erected hastily in winter, in early 1924, to the designs of Alexey Shchusev, the eclectic architect then best known for his neo-Orthodox Kazan station. Shchusev’s sources are obscure, but he may have been inspired both by ancient, despotic ritual architecture – Mexican temples, Assyrian ziggurats, the pyramids of the pharaohs – and by the elemental forms of avant-garde painting, the abstract, ‘non-objective’ shapes floating in space that featured in the work of Kazimir Malevich and his disciples. The mausoleum was placed on the outer wall of the Kremlin, facing not the governmental inner sanctum but the public space of Red Square. The first version was made of a light wood, as the building (and the embalming) was intended to be temporary; it was soon followed by a semi-permanent version, as the Politburo became appreciative of the devotional effect of the corpse-in-state; what sits on Red Square now was redesigned in stone by Shchusev in 1930. By this time, the chameleonic Shchusev had become important as a derivative but skilled Constructivist architect, with elegantly mechanized, streamlined buildings like the Ministry of Agriculture on the Garden Ring; and this new experience informed the re-formed mausoleum. Any mouldings, ornaments or protrusions in the first versions were eliminated, in favour of smooth planes of marble. In a move that would come to dominate the prestige architecture of the ‘socialist countries’, from the Moscow Metro to the Warsaw Biblioteka Narodowa, he selected rich, unusual stones – veiny black-and-red porphyry, bulky and cubic, but deftly giving way at the corner to create a niche for stairs. These stepped upwards to a temple at the top. In the middle was a speaker’s platform – this last was included as a gesture to the ubiquitous parades, forming part of an ensemble with the new Tverskaya/Gorky Street. The tanks and gymnasts and dancers would arrive here to be saluted by the leadership.

This is the mausoleum as it exists today, although it was redesigned for a time to house an embalmed Stalin alongside Lenin, before Khrushchev expelled him from his sarcophagus. Some minor additions have been made, usually farcical – the ill, ineffectual, one-time second-most powerful man in the world Konstantin Chernenko allegedly had an escalator installed in 1984 so that he could wave to parades without having to climb the stairs. Since 1991, both anti-communists and Lenin’s family, who would otherwise have little in common, have demanded his reburial with his mother, as he had specifically requested, but the ensemble is too useful to Russian imperial power, even in its current, deeply attenuated form. As a project, Lenin’s mausoleum is indefensible on every possible level – political, moral, personal; but not, unfortunately, architectural. Both as an object on its own and as part of the gradual, incremental design of Red Square, Shchusev’s building is a masterpiece. Though considerably smaller than most of the other buildings around the ancient Tsarist setpiece of Red Square, from the iron-and-glass Russian Harrods of GUM to the neo-Russian pinnacles of the former Historical Museum, it feels integral, much less of an imposition than the Hotel Moskva nearby. It doesn’t follow the materials of the red-brick, spikily turreted Kremlin wall, but its red stone complements it; the way it steps down from its position, aligned with one of the Kremlin towers, to the long, flat square is masterful; and its presence and power for such a tiny structure is awesome and unforgettable. Even then, the first time we visited Red Square, I couldn’t bring myself to go in, despite Agata’s protestations – she couldn’t see why I had any problem with it, and assumed, correctly, that it was connected with some sentimentality about Lenin himself. In 2014 she convinced me, and we finally waited in line for our encounter with the great man.

Red Square, with the Lenin Mausoleum in the foreground (1961 postcard)

The queues are not as long as they used to be, when visitors from all over the USSR and the socialist camp had this as an integral part of their itineraries, and the apparatus of fences around the mausoleum designed to hold them usually looks mostly empty; given also that it was raining heavily when we visited, we waited for a mere two minutes before beginning our entry, or, rather, our descent. You enter the mausoleum through a small black-marble door, and then walk down a flight of marble steps into a dark, black crypt. Guards stand upright on either side; Agata whispers a question to me and is immediately silenced by a soldier imposingly, if wordlessly, putting a finger to his lips. Then you get to the room where the sarcophagus lies. It is small, hoisted on a plinth, around which you are to slowly file – travelogues often mention the line being pushed around it at great speed to keep the queue going, but we’re given a good few minutes and left unharassed, unless anyone makes the mistake of turning around, breaking the orderly progression around the body. Under the ceiling are stylized red flags in a Constructivist zigzag, but this room is not a Constructivist space, and Melnikov’s glass coffin was long replaced with an equally strange, if more ornate, glazed sarcophagus by the sculptor Nikolai Tomsky. The room is deathly, unearthly, and strongly ritualistic – ‘spiritual’. The corpse or waxwork or composite of the two is backlit, revealing a pale, slightly ginger head and a frail, tiny body, approximately one tenth the size of the average Lenin statue. The backlighting makes the head glow, making it appear especially waxy. Then you’re out, and the guards chaperone you around the memorials of communist worthies between the mausoleum and the Kremlin Wall, where Stalin’s grave has been predictably and depressingly furnished with fresh bouquets. It was raining so heavily by this point that I attempted to just walk across the square and get shelter in GUM, but a blast on a guard’s whistle put paid to any ideas like that. I couldn’t connect the experience remotely with the revolutionary whose body I had just encountered. It was the first and only corpse I have ever seen, given that the secular funerals of my grandparents didn’t encourage contemplation of their bodies. If they’d been much more important communists, some decades earlier, in another country …

What the Lenin Mausoleum does – still – is drill into the mind the power of a minutely choreographed intersection of architecture and ritual. It is hugely effective, every part of the process – when you enter the door and begin your descent down those black steps it is hard not to gasp. The success of the Lenin ritual was not lost on other communist leaders, at least not when their own big men started to die off. Lenin’s embalming team came into high demand from the late 1940s onwards. The first to be embalmed was the Bulgarian premier and Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov, renowned in his day for defending himself against Göring in the Reichstag trial; persistent rumour has it that he was poisoned on Stalin’s orders for being potentially too close to Tito. True or not, Sofia got a temple devoted to his corpse, again of a severe, rectilinear, reduced form; alone of all of them, it was demolished in 1999, to widespread protest. Undemolished is the mausoleum for the Czechoslovak Stalinist Klement Gottwald, a vile figure who instituted the most bloody of all the purges outside the USSR, sending many close friends and comrades to their graves while fully aware of their innocence; and outside Europe Mao and Ho Chi Minh also got their own temple-mausolea, in both cases against their clearly expressed wishes.³ Tito, though not embalmed, also received a mausoleum. Two of these can be fairly easily visited, so we did so.

The mausoleum of Klement Gottwald still exists, but the body of Gottwald himself no longer occupies it, and has not done since quite soon after his embalming – mistakes were made, and he started rotting, so was placed into a closed sarcophagus instead. One reason why the mausoleum survives is that it forms only one part of a larger complex, rather than being dedicated just to the high-tech showcasing of one man’s dead body – the Czech National Memorial, a museum complex on Vítkov Hill in Prague. It is one of the former Czechoslovak capital’s many vertical features built onto hilltop sites, and was begun in 1925, to the designs of Jan Zázvorka. As architecture, it is the functionalism dominant in interwar Czechoslovakia classicized and stone-clad in order to serve convincingly as an eternal monument rather than as a transient thing like a department store or workers’ housing – a marble cube on a plinth, essentially. Only the front façade was completed, complemented after the war by an equestrian statue of the Hussite leader Jan Žižka. The Gottwald Mausoleum is at the back of the mostly Socialist Realist complex that this was rebuilt into after the war, to revised designs by Zázvorka, and which received an annexe for the dead leader after his demise in 1953. As the mausoleum forms the culmination of a processional route, the rest of the museum needs to be described first. The spaces of the National Memorial, which entail congress halls, war memorials, the mausoleum and a relatively new permanent exhibition on communist Czechoslovakia, are a spectacular reminder of just how little there was to choose between official monumental architecture, even in a liberal democracy like interwar Czechoslovakia, and Socialist Realism; you can walk through it even having some familiarity with architectural styles and not know what is from before the war and what is from after it.

This can be seen in the spaces of memory that occupy the high, columned space that now includes the permanent exhibition. The surfaces everywhere here are familiar to any visitor to the Lenin Mausoleum or the Moscow Metro – shiny, rich, intense marble everywhere, in red, black and grey. At the side of this is the Chapel to Soldiers Killed in the War. In the original design, this was dedicated to executed Czech legionnaires who fought in the First World War against their Austrian masters. The mosaic decoration of this murky alcove was executed by Max Švabinský, and in terms of form, it isn’t far from the Moscow Metro – realistic figures, fretted with enamel and gold. The elongated, unproletarian bodies and use of symbolic nudity (a floating nymph with breast bared and head covered, raising a finger to her lips) are the giveaway. On the doors, a very late Art Nouveau candelabra of two nude figures in mourning is neighboured by reliefs of workmen’s hands carrying hammers and sickles; verses by the former Surrealist communist poet Vítězslav Nezval are embossed in gold on marble. On the other side is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, three black marble sarcophagi capped by golden lamps, with what appear to be demounted flags as their bases. In between, there are the recent spaces of memory, a series of objects tracing the peculiar history of Czech Communism – resistance, electoral victory, coup, terror, ‘socialism with a human face’, Warsaw Pact-imposed ‘normalization’ and eventual defeat. Bar a more sympathetic portrayal of Václav Havel than would be accepted by many Czechs, it is informative and uncontroversial, and contains at the end a room where you can write your own political slogans, demands or ideas on the wall. There are scrawled hammer and sickles and, among others, the slogans ‘No! I want communism!’ (in Czech), ‘Poland remembers too’ (in Polish) and ‘I heart democracy, even if it doesn’t work’ (in English), which is a quite apt summation of common Czech, Polish and Anglo-American sentiments.

What does it mean to want to write that you want communism after walking round a place like this? Providing this is what you think communism is, what is it exactly that you want? The meeting hall here is one of the most memorable, and terrifying, spaces created by Stalinism anywhere in Europe. Its cyclopean scale and use of so much red marble that you’re practically irradiated as you walk around is comparable to very few buildings, and Albert Speer’s Reich Chancellery is one of them. The triple-height space is suspended with fluted columns that are almost purple, and the third tier is deep red. A non-structural frame of red marble appears to hold it all together, leading to a partly glazed ceiling, though it all feels impervious to natural light or fresh air. At the head of the hall is a huge bronze wreath fit to be placed on the head of a giant. Such an imposing, intense and (vain)glorious space is undeniably impressive and affecting, although you could be forgiven for reacting the other way, by refusing to be intimidated and seeing it just as overblown and pompous. There is a another mosaic at the entrance to the Hall of Czech Peasants, and compared to those in the chapel these men and women here are rather sturdier, people who work with their hands, although also people of remarkable rosy-cheeked beauty. Here, communism means an imperial level of glory, grandeur, opulence and display, one which is perhaps attractive in a context of pragmatic, unromantic capitalist ‘normalization’ but not of great value in itself.

The Memorial Hall at Vitkov Hill, Prague

Finally, after all this, you reach the mausoleum. It is in a semi-circular extension at the furthest end of the National Memorial, symmetrical with that cubic front façade. At one point, you could have entered from this direction, through some curious doors decorated with high bas-reliefs of Red Army soldiers liberating Czechs. The figures are like little toys in their scrupulously detailed beards and trenchcoats, gesticulating, playing accordion, stretching their arms out to point the way forward to the future. Inside, you reach Gottwald as the terminus, as the official culmination of the national history of the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia. Through doors lined in more black marble you come first to a sarcophagus in white marble containing the despot (formerly – he was cremated in 1962). In front of you are several mosaic figures in Socialist Realist style depicting Czech soldiers, parachutists, generals; in between each is an uplighter straight out of the Moscow Metro design guide. Above is a mosaic blue sky full of stars, and the lion, the Czech national emblem. Even here, we are national in form, socialist in content. This is a typical Stalinist space, then, with not much to distinguish it but the extremely high level of craftsmanship and the intense crepuscular creepiness. The only thing the new owners of the space did after 1989 was open a passageway underneath, directly aligned with the sarcophagus. Walk down its stairs and you’re at a control room in blue teak and black plastic, where various dials and knobs would regulate the temperature of the mausoleum in order to ensure that Gottwald stayed inviolate. Opposite those controls are busts of Lenin, Stalin and Gottwald himself, darkly lit in horror film fashion. It is a clever, theatrical revelation of the subterfuge, of the technology behind the magic, an ironic cry of ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!’ A member of staff tells us that this too is a fake – the control panels are not authentic but are ‘put there for the tourists’. But what the National Memorial does is mostly rather subtle. Rather than whacking you over the head and telling you that Communism Was Very Bad, it preserves its ceremonial space as much as possible, only making little interventions to highlight some of the greater absurdities; it fits closely with the ironical, ambiguous view that many Czechs have of the regime, rather than the absolute moral certainty sometimes common elsewhere.

Soviet–Czech friendship on the doors of the National Memorial, Prague

Though Klement Gottwald and Josip Broz Tito were both, in 1945, ardent Stalinists, the sort of fanatical local chieftains that terrified their opponents, the places where each was buried are most unalike, reflecting their particular trajectories. Tito’s mausoleum is easily found from the centre of Belgrade, a walk down a steep hill from the Serbian capital’s largest building, a neo-Byzantine Orthodox cathedral, handsome from a distance, tacky up close, begun in the 1930s, left well alone under the communists and then expensively completed under Milošević. The memorial space to Tito is really three buildings, two of them completed during his lifetime, the other after his death; all them are in a small park, reached via winding paths from a concrete amphitheatre, with a pool and defunct fountains, and steps upwards; there is a view of the Belgrade skyline and loitering youth. Here there’s one of the Marshal’s several villas, a typical bit of mid-century contemporary, of interest in showcasing the tastes of Tito – he shocked more ascetic foreign communists with his taste for cigars, yachts and Adriatic villas, forming friendships with Liz Taylor, Richard Burton and their ilk. The Praxis group philosopher Svetozar Stojanović explained these lapses in terms of class. ‘Communists who have grown up in an impoverished and envious environment, like Tito, are most often inclined to enjoy material privileges and a high lifestyle. Communists from well-off families usually endeavour to “redeem” themselves by despising high comforts and benefits.’ It was only the revolutionaries from bourgeois backgrounds (like Lenin, presumably) who followed its principles in their actual lives.⁴ One historian has claimed that this wasn’t so much a breach of Leninist decency as an extreme example of the highly developed consumer culture in the Socialist Federal Republic. That’s as may be, but the building housing his body is neither austere nor, in fact, particularly showy or luxurious. The actual mausoleum is known as the ‘House of Flowers’, and is relatively simple – rather than the darkly lit funereal pomp of Stalinism, we have a small greenhouse, filled with constantly renewed flowers, with Tito underneath an undemonstrative gravestone. It’s one of the few communist memorial spaces that is in no way frightening.

The House of Flowers, Belgrade (1980s postcard)

In fact, the personality cult of Tito is more extensively expressed in the 25 May Museum, a museum, mark you, devoted to the annual celebrations of Tito’s birthday, built in his honour as a public gallery of the esteem in which he was held. It is now officially the Museum of Yugoslav History, though it doesn’t seem to serve this purpose much.⁵ If you didn’t know anything about the numerous paradoxes and hypocrisies of self-management socialism you would assume that such a thing would only be devoted to a Ceaușescu or a Kim Il-sung. So it is a monument to a personality cult, and personality cults are by definition a bad thing, but there is quite a lot to like about the Tito’s Birthday Museum. Placed at an incline up the hill from the disused fountains, it rests lightly on a ridge between dense trees, a symmetrical glass building held up on thin, tapered pilotis. Its wings are wing-shaped, and in between is a black and grey mosaic in Archaic Greek style showing, on one side, Partisans, on the other, what appear to be ancient warriors with pikes, an unexpectedly atavistic image in the usually Modernist vocabulary of socialist Yugoslavia, with its anti-nationalist ideology of ‘brotherhood and unity’. Partisan leader and Warrior, then. Inside, a spiral staircase and Yugoslav ships in vitrines; on the counter, various kinds of Yugo-tat are for sale, examples of the popular form of Ostalgia over here. Rather than seeing this as a longing for socialism, some in the former Yugoslavia see it as another form of its suppression; as the young Slovene critic Primož Krašovec writes, ‘it is not a coincidence that this form of (collective) popular memory is named after a term from the repertoire of individual psychology. The term “(Yugo)nostalgia” is very precise and telling, since (Yugo)nostalgia is a result of a process whereby collective (and thus political) memory becomes reduced to a sum of personal experiences and individual memories. Yugonostalgia is what remains after the process of depoliticization of the collective memory of socialism – it is a form of popular memory that has been washed clean of all traces of political demands for social equality, workers’ participation in the production process, and internationalism as well as for the anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, and anti-chauvinism that constituted the core of the revolutionary politics of socialism.’ Most fundamentally, it’s based on buying stuff, whether actual ‘vintage’ or the contemporary Titoist trinkets available here. We followed suit, our rectitude compromised by amazement at seeing a still-extant public and publicly-funded institution completely and unambiguously celebrating the leader of a socialist revolution, the leader of a Communist Party.

But does that mean the 25 May Museum celebrates socialism and communism? Unsurprisingly, not really. Along with the permanent collection of gifts for Tito – tapestries, cigar cases, etc. – there is a very good collection of Yugoslav modern art, and the original fittings of the Museum’s first incarnation. Principal among these is a golden map, onto which the various places that Marshal Tito visited are highlighted, with the year. Walter Benjamin spotted one much like this in Moscow, in 1926, soon after Lenin’s death; he wrote that on it, ‘Lenin’s life resembles a campaign of colonial conquest across Europe’.⁶ The Tito version is the same bar the absence of flashing lights. If there is anything interesting in the map, it’s the internationalist trajectory it highlights. Great Britain, France, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were given a mere one visit each by the Marshal – Egypt (the ‘United Arab Republic’ when the map was made), though, was visited five times, India and the USSR three times each, plus visits to Ghana, Indonesia, Algeria … the reason for this is of course Yugoslavia’s position in the Non-Aligned Movement – i.e. its international alignment with countries that had successfully resisted colonialism, and that were taking a path of developmentalism and independence from either of the imperial blocs. The 25 May Museum is of dubious significance for any kind of socialism, but it has this one little moment that points elsewhere. Since 1989, everywhere in the former Soviet empire has desperately wanted to be a Normal European Country and begged its way into NATO and the EU, leaping from one imperial bloc into another; each has rewritten its history so that it becomes, as Dubravka Ugrešić puts it, a bulwark against something, usually something from the East.⁷ For Europeans striving not to be colonies of Russia or America, making common cause with those in Africa or Asia striving not to be colonies of Britain or France is a distant but oddly inspiring moment. In a context where spaces are so full of death that they appear permanently – and, often, mercifully – closed, it is a rare flash of possibility.

The Non-Aligned Map at the 25 May Museum, Belgrade

THE MISSING MEMORIALS OF THE REVOLUTION

Krašovec’s argument that iconography from the socialist era can be assimilated so long as it doesn’t actually suggest socialist politics is amply supported by the striking absence in the post-communist space of something that was once exceptionally common – memorials to, and museums of, revolution. You are considerably more likely to find a war memorial with an extended, gilded inscription from a speech of Josef Stalin than you are to find a memorial to the October Revolution still surviving. The fate of two statues in prominent places in Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, makes this very clear. One of them is a Monument to the Establishment of Soviet Power in Ukraine, the other is one of the survivors of the vast quantity of Lenin monuments scattered in their tens of thousands from Erfurt to Ulan Bator. The Monument to the Establishment of Soviet Power needs some history to be fully explained. The ‘Russian’ Civil War was at its most complex and multifaceted in Ukraine, where the Red Army, first with and then against a large anarchist force led by Nestor Makhno, faced off against not only the Tsarist revanche and foreign armies of intervention (here, largely German) that they faced everywhere else, but also against various Ukrainian nationalist armies under the nominal control of Ukrainian governments – whose face could be social democratic, like the historian Mihailo Hrushevsky, or fiercely nationalistic, as with Symon Petliura, whose forces were notorious for pogroms on a scale unprecedented even here, estimated to have killed 60,000 Jewish civilians.⁸ The rising of the workers at the Kiev Arsenal in 1918 failed to secure the city for the Bolsheviks, so a Ukrainian Soviet Republic was set up in the much more pro-Bolshevik industrial city of Kharkiv instead – which became, after the Reds’ victory in 1921, the centre of the largest expansion of Ukrainian-language education and culture that had been seen to that date, so fulfilling many of the Ukrainian nationalists’ demands.⁹

The Monument to the Establishment of Soviet Power in Ukraine, Kharkiv

So the monument is not wholly a monument to Russian domination, but it does, obviously, take a side. The working men and women and Red Army soldiers who seized the city in 1918 are depicted as chiselled-cheekboned behemoths, pieced together out of great cubic chunks of red sandstone, so large that you can see cement-seeping gaps between them that revealed them to be cladding on concrete. The design is original, but conforms to a standard type of the later Soviet era, with the five giants ranged around a central, semi-abstract plinth, so that the monument could be admired from all sides. Look at photographs, when they survive, of the people who were the revolution and they do not look like this: they were awkward, with strange Edwardian facial hair, spindly and ill-fed, and their heroism was in their actions rather than their appearance. The monument was a spectacularization of the revolution, its travesty into superheroics.

This is unlikely to be the reason why the monument was demolished in 2012.¹⁰ It stood in the relatively picturesque part of Kharkiv, where socialist neo-Baroque, Art Nouveau and some Orthodox domes in pretty green squares connected by steps form a non-concrete enclave. Accordingly, it was in the bit of the city that tourists were likely to see when they visited to watch football games there in the Poland/Ukraine-hosted European Championship. But in the vast asphalt plain of the former Dzerzhinsky Square, Lenin remained on his red granite plinth, pointing proudly to the Gosprom/Derzhprom building behind him. In fact, in one of the pre-tournament ads shown in Ukraine the square, in some accounts the largest in Europe, was proudly shown – without Lenin. A press release was sent out by city authorities to reassure people that actually this was just a bit of creative retouching on the part of the advertiser and Lenin was staying put. A Soviet statue depicting a collective action is unacceptable. That’s communist. One that shows a heroic leader is just fine. Lenin, in Putinist ideology (and the ideas of Ukraine’s Party of the Regions were not dissimilar), is remembered along with Ivan the Terrible, Peter, Catherine, Nicholas II, Stalin, Brezhnev, and whoever else had a sufficiently iron fist, as one of the people that made Russia ‘great’. Lenin’s repeated denunciations of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ and reprimands for those colleagues (like Dzerzhinsky and Stalin) who made concessions to it are, naturally, forgotten, in the event that they were ever known in the first place.

Lenin, Freedom/Dzerzhinsky Square, Kharkiv (1987 postcard)

It is possible that Lenin survives as a ‘hero’ not because he’s seen as a socialist, but because he’s seen – albeit on the most fraudulent historical grounds – as a nationalist. He was certainly a state-builder; and in the statue in Dzerzhinsky Square, it would seem he was a body-builder. However, to object to these statues on the basis of their bad taste or their travesty of history is to miss the role they play in maintaining Soviet memory for a significant part of the population, for those who refuse to recall their youth as an endless Gulag, but as something of which they are, at times justly, quite proud. In the aftermath of the overthrow of Yanukovych and the Party of Regions in early 2014, Lenin statues were toppled all over Ukraine. This was explained to us by young Ukrainian leftists as something that the celebratory people not in Kiev could do, an act they could commit to show their support for the rising and relief after Yanukovych’s flight; ‘the monuments were devoid of real political meaning from the moment they were put up’, Oleksandr Burlaka told Agata and me. We weren’t totally convinced – why else were they a target other than through an ideology they were seen to encapsulate, and why did far-rightists from the Svoboda party so often take the lead in removing them? And why, in many cities in eastern and southern Ukraine, did groups of citizens form to defend them? It seems to easy to say, as did Slavoj Žižek among others,¹¹ that the defenders of Lenin, just like the topplers of the statues, saw him as a symbol of Russian nationalism (here seen positively). One of the statues which citizens assembled to defend was exactly this Lenin-colossus in Kharkiv. By April 2014, the local Maidan (here, as in Kiev, with many left-wingers among them) had apparently agreed with this ‘Anti-Maidan’ to leave Lenin alone, but it was eventually pulled down to the acclaim of world liberals in a small demonstration that September, led by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Batallion, stationed here for the war with the Russian-backed ‘republics’ in nearby Donbass. The mayor of Kharkiv immediately pledged to rebuild it.¹²

What the Leninoclasm of Ukraine in early 2014 revealed was partly a certain weakness for cliché, a belated replay of 1989 for those who wanted one: there’s nothing like a toppled communist statue to cry ‘Democracy!’ and ‘Freedom!’ to liberals and Western journalists, even if its removal was hugely unpopular (a massive majority in a Kiev opinion poll saw the statue’s removal as mere vandalism), and even if it was torn down by neo-fascists and then daubed in anti-Semitic graffiti. Yet it also revealed just how many Lenins were left. Maps appeared, showing dozens of toppled (or soon-to-be-toppled) statues across central and eastern Ukraine. This was a reminder that Lenins were, quite literally, an industry. A samizdat photograph taken in the 1970s showed the yard of one of the factories that created Lenins¹³ – twenty or so identical Vladimir Ilyiches, seated and bent imposingly forward, a common Lenin pose, along with the more famous outstretched arm (there are no photographs of him in either position, of course). They first became an institution only a couple of years after Lenin’s death. The earliest surviving – the earliest of all – was designed for the square in front of Leningrad’s newly renamed Finland Station, and erected in 1926. As anyone who’s read Ten Days That Shook the World or seen October knows, it is here that Lenin arrived from exile in April 1917, jumped onto an armoured car, and announced to the assembled crowd that the workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets should prepare to seize power from the Provisional Government – to the alarm and horror of most Bolsheviks.¹⁴ How to represent such an event, where there was a such a link between the leader and the masses, rather than a lone bearded gent in a square?

Later statues, such as that in Freedom/Dzerzhinsky Square in Kharkiv, would get around this in a typically Stalinist way, by featuring an assembled flag-waving crowd in low-relief in the bottom tiers of a stepped plinth, with Lenin himself, giant-size, at the top. The designer of the Finland Station Lenin, the architect Vladimir Schukuo, must have thought the option of Lenin on top of an armoured car a little bit literal. What he designed for the leader was an abstract sculpture in bronze, where the car would be suggested by an avant-garde assemblage of cubes and cylinders, as if in motion, in the process of formation; but on top of that, a strict realist bronze of the man pointing forward and looking more healthy and musclebound than ascetic, itinerant intellectuals tend to. Like the Lenin Mausoleum itself, it’s caught between early-Soviet Modernism and the traditionalist-eclectic domination that would follow. It was recently repaired, having been shot at by an oligarch, passing in his chauffered car. He blasted the backside of Lenin with a bazooka, and perhaps deserves credit for knowing fully what Lenin actually stood for, i.e. the destruction of people like him.

Other Lenins survive, albeit mostly limited to the East Slavic nations. In the EU, there are a couple in Bulgaria or the Russian-speaking districts of Estonia, but there’s at least one prominent Lenin in almost every large-sized Russian, Belarusian and eastern/southern Ukrainian city. The standard didn’t leave much room for artistic development – the plinths are often more interesting, though they always have a frisson. Take the various Lenins in Nizhny Novgorod. We found at least five in situ during a week in the city, and as our friend Kirill Kobrin pointed out, they have a ‘life of Jesus’ quality, showing the various possible ways you could identify with Vladimir Ilyich – baby Lenin (a plaque in high relief showing the Ulyanov family), youthful insurgent Lenin (attending the ‘Nizhny Novgorod Marxist group’ in 1900, outside the heavy, sandstone KGB building), or fatherly leader Lenin (a three-foot-high bust outside the entrance to an apartment block on the river). Addressing the Oka river, commanding a vast square, is one of the USSR’s largest, not much smaller than the tower blocks and hotels that frame it – again, a gigantic Lenin figure with square jaw and sweeping, beckoning gesture, this time flanked by subsidiary figures – woman with flag, workers rising from the ground to fly the banner aloft, etc. They are as repetitive and as specifically meaningful as icons, depicting a man who declared at the start of the 1920s ‘we will sell everything except icons and vodka’.

For both Agata and me, coming across a Lenin at the helm of a square was always a sign that we’d left Normal European Countries behind, which was no doubt part of the reason why they were toppled in Ukraine’s ‘Euromaidan’. Even when Lenins do endure, the Lenin Museums generally do not, with a couple of exceptions in the Russian Federation.¹⁵ Lenin Museums and Museums of the Revolution were sometimes synonymous as spaces of Soviet ritual, but there was the necessary difference in content – the revolutionary museum had to emphasize mass struggle, maybe, even, accidentally, spontaneous action. They had a strange performative role, one which could, without doing it too much injustice, be called ‘magical’. In his short book on Soviet Marxism, Herbert Marcuse wrote of Soviet phraseology that it was meant ‘to be performed like a ritual, which accompanies the realizing action. They are to recall and sustain the required practice. Taken by themselves they are no more committed to the truth than are orders or advertisements: their “truth” is in their effect. Magical elements gain ascendancy over comprehending thought and action.’ Does that mean that this is more evidence of some primeval atavism, some eternal Slavic soul longing for the irrational? On the contrary, Marcuse argued that it was actually very modern, and linked closely with the failure of the revolution to realize its promises.

‘The contemporary reactivation of magical elements is far from primitive. The irrational elements enter into the system of scientifically planned and practised administration – they become part of the scientific management of society. Moreover, the magical features of Soviet theory are turned into an instrument for rescuing the truth. While the ritual formulas, severed from their original cognitive context, thus serve to provide unquestioned directives for unquestioned mass behaviour, they retain, in a hypostatized form, their historical substance. The rigidity with which they are celebrated is to preserve the purity of their substance in the face of an apparently contradicting reality and to enforce verification in the face of apparently conflicting facts which make the pre-established truth into a paradox. It defies reason; it seems absurd. But the absurdity of Soviet Marxism has an objective ground: it reflects the absurdity of a historical situation in which the realisation of the Marxian promises appeared – only to be delayed again – and in which the new productive forces are again used as instruments for productive repression’.¹⁶

What this apparently cryptic Hegelian language is pointing to is that the magic in the Soviet ritual ‘works’: it brings something into being. The evidence of the revolution’s betrayal, of the total contradiction of the actual politics of Lenin himself, the absence of real solidarity, is in its turn contradicted by the performance of the revolution’s commemoration, the public pledging of fealty, the transformation of Lenin into a god, and the ritualization of solidarity in the form of the parade. In architecture, this had a particular spatial kick – spaces that stressed the history of the workers’ movement were ways of both reviving in the memory the hopes and dreams of that movement, and making sure that their realization was impossible.

Take Moscow’s Museum of the Revolution, one of the few survivors. Renamed the Museum of Contemporary History after 1991, it is spread across several sites – a panorama in the Krasnopresnaya district, the preserved houses of revolutionaries, and a Central Museum of the Revolution in the former English Club, a pretty red-painted Doric revival building, the only major survivor of the street’s steroidal Stalinist rebuilding. We visited in 2014 expecting a triumphalist post-socialist redesign, and the entrance hall, with its great framed photographs of V. V. Putin, seemed to confirm this; but after we entered, the only major concessions to the new narratives since the 1990s were occasionally puzzlingly conflicting captions to exhibits – while the exhibits you were looking at would denounce the Tsarist secret police, a caption would tell you what a good job they had done to hold the country together; a celebratory proclamation of the Bolshevik seizure of power would feature a little bilingual text about the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the largest part of the non-Bolshevik left who Trotsky had thrown into the ‘dustbin of history’; and Trotsky himself was a little more present among the photographs and ephemera than he can possibly have been before glasnost. But for these cosmetic changes, this is a Museum of the Revolution, full of exhibits which can’t possibly make any sense to anyone not familiar with that history, as it was drilled into every young brain until 1991. The museum consists of artefacts on display inside and outside glass cases, with what would today maybe be called ‘interactive’ rooms where waxwork people sit permanently in a historic environment of some sort, which goes chronologically from the 1900s to the 1980s. These are fascinating constructions, saying a lot about the era’s values.

Great Patriotic waxworks, the Central Museum of the Revolution, Moscow

The earliest of these environments is a Tsarist prison that you can peek into through the slit in a ragged wooden door, at the end of a corridor. Inside, a waxwork worker suffering katorga sits by a lamp, ill and unshaven. On the adjacent wall, above a samovar and a chamber pot, is a painting of a prison revolt. Nearby is the room of a bourgeois, with ornate furniture and a microscope. These smaller rooms are reached from a vestibule where old magazines, leaflets, paintings and other ephemera are organized round a sculpture of a worker picking up a hammer, as if to wield it imminently, in the revolution of 1905. All the rooms are arranged like this – a central sculpture, exhibits around it, and ‘rooms’ from consecutive political periods. For the 1920s, a model of the Shabolovka Tower is the central sculpture, while a flapper-hairstyled woman sits looking cool in an NEP café, in front of a cake and a pineapple, as if to signify the slightly suspicious semi-capitalist abundance of the era. For the 1930s, the ‘sculpture’ is a tractor, the room is a mock-up of the office of the Stalinist Commissar of Industry, Sergo Ordzhonikidze. In the section on the Russian Civil War, the room features a kulak hoarding grain in a grim wooden house; for the post-war high-Stalinist era, a teenage girl sits at her study in front of an image of Moscow State University; and for the Khrushchev era, the sculpture is of course a Vostok space module. This masquerade coexists happily with ‘real’ exhibits, just as it does in, say, London’s Imperial War Museum: real handwritten banners from the revolution, real mimeographed leaflets from red Petrograd, real shells, real scraggy uniforms. Objects from which the real messy unplanned revolution seeps through are placed on the wall alongside monumental realist canvases of the exact same events, to enforce their meaning. The authentic and the constructed, priceless works of art and 1980s kitsch, align together in a historical fantasy which is both obviously a construction while being scrupulously naturalistic. You become ‘closer to history’ through these immersive spaces, but it is not a history open to interpretation.

Yet in museums you are aware you’re seeing something curated, something pieced together, no matter how apparently immersive or interactive its artefacts. Another way that the magic was conveyed was through a ‘real’ space which had endured through the years, and hence could become a sort of sacred relic. Sometimes the cultic historic buildings actually existed, but often these relics were salvaged from ruins; in some cases, they actually had to be re-created, as when the planners of post-war Minsk, projecting the Belarusian capital anew as a Stalinist showcase, rebuilt only a small wooden house, simply because it had hosted the first conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, best known for its later warring factions, the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The former Council of Ministers Building in East Berlin is one of the GDR’s more immediately odd structures, as it doesn’t appear to conform to either the Socialist Realist or Modernist versions of East German aesthetics. There is a block facing the street with wide windows, dressed with red mullions – good contemporary architecture, maybe with a little classicizing hint in the delicate mouldings. But there in the middle for some reason is a fragment of granite eighteenth-century Baroque.

This atypical linking of classical and modern in one structure, rather than being placed apart and in contrast, is the consequence of the decision to preserve just one part of a largely bomb-destroyed building – the central wing with its balcony, because from here the communist Karl Liebknecht, leader with Rosa Luxemburg of the far-left, anti-war Spartacus movement, had proclaimed a Socialist Republic in the chaos of the German Revolution of November 1918. The official proclamation of the Republic the same day by the Social Democrats was not a sign of their confidence – some were still holding out for a constitutional monarchy – but a way of neutralizing any Spartacist claim to the revolution. This would be confirmed, it must be said, by the elections soon after, where (amid considerable anti-Spartacist violence) the official Social Democrats won a clear victory, with the anti-war Independent Social Democrats coming second. But though a majority of Germans may have rejected communism at the polls, keeping the balcony was a means of keeping the claim of the German Socialist Republic alive, a constant, three-dimensional proof of legitimacy. Though libertarian socialists like Liebknecht and Luxemburg had little in common politically with Walther Ulbricht or Erich Honecker, keeping their memory alive was essential for the GDR, a way of proving the existence of a popular mandate. The cult of the popular murdered pre-1933 communist leader Ernst Thälmann served a similar purpose, hence his gigantist – and preserved – memorial complex in Prenzlauer Berg. But it wasn’t enough just to point to the historical record – no, the actual balcony itself had to be retained. This way of regarding historic buildings is not limited to ‘real socialism’: note, for instance, that during the clearance of a huge swathe of terraced housing near the centre of Liverpool, campaigners successfully won the concession that the street where Ringo Starr used to live would be saved – but their distinctive combination of militant materialism and magical thinking meant that they had a particular taste for it.

GDR Council of Ministers Building, Berlin, with Liebknecht’s sacred balcony (1969 postcard)

One pivotal building for the Russian socialist movement that didn’t have to be put back together or replicated is the house of Matilda Kshesinskaya, in the Petrogradsky district of St Petersburg, on the north side of the Neva. It was eventually purchased by the state and turned in 1957 into the Museum of the Revolution, and more recently became, with some considerable tweaking, the Museum of Russian Political History. Rather than a revolutionary, Kshesinskaya was a ballerina and favourite of Tsar Nicholas II, and she was wealthy enough to commission a house, a typical piece of decadent Art Nouveau built in 1906. After Nicholas’s abdication, but before their seizure of power, the Bolsheviks expropriated it and used it as an office. Hounded out after the riots of July 1917, their more famous base of operations was similarly unlikely – a neoclassical girls’ school, the Smolny Institute, which still has a Lenin in front of it, but otherwise serves a non-commemorative role as the governor of St Petersburg’s office. So perhaps the only space left that strictly commemorates the ‘Great October Socialist Revolution’ in the city where it occurred just happens to be a very pretty Jugendstil villa built for a ballerina. As architecture, it’s quite delightful, an asymmetrical design with turrets, neatly cut yellow glazed bricks, stained glass and lots of iron and glass, including a large, beautifully detailed curved-glass bay window, from which Kshesinskaya could watch the world go by in the street outside. It’s Art Nouveau at its more modern edge, spreading out with an informal, de-centred plan which suggests the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Houses, rather than Art Nouveau as a form of appliqué onto the usual tenement or house. It’s a house which people might conceivably visit for its own sake, though peculiarly ill-suited for its later purpose. Poets of the revolution were aware of the incongruity: Mayakovsky wrote of how:

         Kshesinskaya’s palace,
                  earned by twiddling toes
today’s invaded
                  by boots steel-heeled

In the museum itself, we do not learn what the assembled revolutionaries may have thought about this piece of bourgeois decadence – and remember, Art Nouveau was the lowest of the low in their architectural ideology – but rather it is treated with the same reverence as the city’s neoclassical relics. It would be interesting to know whether these railings of flowers and leaves, these big glass bays, were of interest to the ragged-arsed proletariat that expropriated it. But then, the proletariat isn’t supposed to look like that, and in one of the building’s surviving furnishings from its former incarnation, they don’t. You do get the full intimidating treatment from the staff – special prices for foreigners, plastic bags for your feet so you don’t stomp around getting it muddy (imagine the same stricture in 1917!), and strictly no photography. Murals on the walls show heroic workers and peasants doing their heroic-workers-and-peasants thing, and in the vitrines documents which take an ambiguous view, but generally a negative one, of the Bolsheviks, the revolution and its consequences, although Lenin’s room is still preserved. A room which used to have revolutionary porcelain now has exhibits on Putin and Medvedev, something which saddened even those formidable women on the staff. Why it was preserved for this purpose is still enduringly strange. When walking round you were supposed to think about what happened in this building, but are presumed not to be interested in the building itself; to feel the air of revolution, to get its whiff, to touch the same walls that Lenin touched (if the guards will let you). That doesn’t mean the building itself is neutral – how can it be when it has to be closely preserved and re-created?

If 1917 is still far too controversial for most of its memorials to be left as they were, the same is not necessarily true of other revolutions. In Ruse, in northern Bulgaria, there is an unusual Pantheon to the revolutionary heroes that helped the country throw off the ‘Ottoman Yoke’ in the late nineteenth century. Since national oppression was perpetrated by Turks rather than Russians – in fact, the Tsarist Empire actively supported the Bulgarian revolutionaries – it was quite acceptable to celebrate a national revolution here, with no likelihood that this could, as commemorations of anti-Tsarist risings did, spill over into the public expression of anti-Soviet sentiments.¹⁷ The first sight of the Pantheon, just outside Ruse’s attractive, recently renovated fin-de-siècle centre, reveals a very unexpected steal: although the building you are looking at from the other side of a sweeping and overgrown square is a 1970s memorial and ossuary to the heroic figures of a revolutionary movement of the 1870s, you are in fact looking at a rebuilding of the 1890s Secession building in Vienna, which was a deliberately decadent, opulent showcase for various naughty, aestheticist kinds of art. The heavy, neo-Assyrian stone pylons and the gold-plated cupola are not only similar in superficial appearance; they also have similar relations of proportion. The major difference is the relative lack of ornament and fol-de-rol in that cupola, and the fact that a cross has been placed on top of it – recently, as an act of ‘re-Christianization’.

The Pantheon of National Revival Heroes, Ruse

As with many of the ‘social condensers’, this memorial has the clear aim of replacing a religious experience, and not only because it replaced a church, to much enduring controversy. The ‘National Revival’ of the 1870s may have been in some ways a secular revolution, although aided by the Orthodox big brother next door against a Muslim empire, but the building has attempted the creation of the sense of hushed awe and uncanniness found in a church. The architect, Nikola Nikolov, had to avoid obvious Christian (or, here, Byzantine) references, and the gilded dome is not unique to any particular faith; and like Shchusev in the Lenin Mausoleum, many of the other architectural gestures are borrowed from the heavy, elemental style of the antique Near East. Inside, the place is haunting, with a gauzy light coming from the slits under the cupola, ethereal marble ladies in mourning built sheer into the walls, coffins along the floor, and a remarkable wooden frieze of nineteenth-century insurgents. In the centre, under the dome, is an exhibition. Agata whispers to me, so as not to be heard by a Bulgarian tour group: ‘They have icons painted last year.’ Again, religion has reclaimed the attempt to build a space of secular revolutionary ritual.

However, this building, no matter how derivative, is still deeply peculiar and unique – most revolutionary memorials aimed at a more generic quality. It’s surprising at first to find that even in cities that are keen to erase any traces of the commemoration of the October Revolution, the monuments to its ‘rehearsal’, the revolution of 1905, are generally preserved, even in countries that pride themselves on anti-communism. 1905 was remarkably similar in its trajectory to 1917. As a result of military defeat (here at the hands of Japan, in the Russo-Japanese war), poverty, poor working conditions and imperial oppression, risings broke out all over the Russian Empire. At first they were peaceful and even monarchist – as in the infamous ‘Bloody Sunday’, where priest and police spy Father Gapon led a devout crowd to be massacred in St Petersburg’s Palace Square; then, they became much more radical and explicitly socialist, with workers forming, for the first time, ‘Soviets’, directly elected councils, to organize their affairs; in St Petersburg, Trotsky, then a Menshevik, was elected as the Soviet’s leader. Though the Tsar neutralized the protests by allowing relatively free elections, protests and strikes raged on until 1906, before repression had its effect. The main difference with 1917, other than defeat, was the fact it encompassed the whole Russian Empire, without a large chunk of it being occupied by Germany, as it was twelve years later – which means that the revolution also took place in Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, all of which had lock-outs, strikes, risings and Soviets.

There are monuments, then, in the centres of Tallinn and Riga; these are not full-on quasi-architectural ensembles but the more regular bronzes on plinths, though their survival in cities that have otherwise cleansed themselves almost entirely of heroic monuments is notable enough. As they are monuments to a defeated revolution, their heroism has to be in some way combined with pathos, a mix of emotions that made it a trickier job for sculptors than most. The Tallinn monument is made up of three figures – a man, a woman and a child, on top of the usual red-granite steps, which are simply decorated with the bronze year ‘1905’. The man, a bare-chested worker, is prone, and covering part of his chest with a cloth, implying that he has been shot; he lies on collapsed flags. The woman, with the small child clinging to her skirts, waves her hand in the air as if to beg the soldiers to hold their fire. This is Socialist Realism in its high-Stalinist version, so rather than the heroes being abstracted and slightly cubic, the example is still the Renaissance: the three figures are held in a perfectly balanced tension, with the curve of the woman’s arm matching the curled-in leg of the injured worker. Her face is carefully rendered, her look one of mingled concern and anger. The Riga monument, too, captures the moment of defeat in strictly realist fashion, with one worker fallen, and another, above him, striving forward, flag in hand; its arcing forms harmonize rather well with the recently completed late-1980s National Library on the other side of the Daugava. The largest surviving memorial complex that we managed to find was in Łódź, which was, along with St Petersburg, one of the most militant cities in the revolution, with its largely female workforce conducting long, bitter strikes, aided – or not – by actions from the paramilitary organizations of the Polish Socialist Party, led then by one Józef Piłsudski.

We found out that the Łódź 1905 memorial survived through pure accident, rather than through research – there were photographs of it in a 1970s book, and notes in a tourist booklet suggested that a ‘hideously ugly’ monument to 1905 survived in Józef Piłsudski Park. We put two and two together, and after walking for nearly an hour through the interminable parks planted on the edges of the city centre after the war to give the dense industrial city some relief, we managed to find somebody who could tell us where it was – an elderly couple who seemed as pleased as they were surprised that anybody was interested. When we found it, the structure was unmistakable. It is officially known as the ‘Monument of the Revolutionary Deed’, and was designed for the sixtieth anniversary in 1975 by the sculptor Kazimierz Karpiński. It consists of six billowing, twisted obelisks and a low relief of sculptures and inscriptions, all of it in glorious grey granite and reinforced concrete. No red sandstone, bronze or Michelangelesque balance here. The square in front is set on a slope, with pathways and steps leading off back into the park on either side, something which makes it prime skateboarding territory. These wavy semi-obelisks have been modelled as organic abstract sculpture, the concrete riddled with fleshy indentations, with them all being joined at the top by concrete arms. Each bears a year between 1905 and 1909 (after which Łódź was fully ‘pacified’), with of course 1905 itself at the front.

Originally, however, as our 1970s book proved,¹⁸ one of the arms featured the year ‘1948’, when Polish communists took full power; this was removed and replaced with just another ‘1905’. This is fair enough, as 1905 was a popular revolution, and 1948 was a coup courtesy of elections rigged at its eastern neighbour’s behest; the problem is not its excision, but its being read backwards so that one determines the other. Regardless, the relief sculpture is Soviet as Soviet can be, in the ‘severe style’ that directly succeeded Socialist Realism – workers in concrete so stark that they’re Easter Island-esque, with no details, just all face and force – the granite cladding is set in an overlaying pattern, broken only by jaws, fists, noses, forearms, breasts. But as a secluded spot, with a slope and lots of places to sit, it’s a major congregation point for Łódź’s youth; each of these twisted obelisks, stelae, tentacles or whatever they are is coated on the lower levels by dozens of inscriptions saying who loves whom. So the memorial is domesticated, and it is probably better than the authoritarian rituals of stomping parades and worthy speeches. Can its domestication coexist with a revolutionary charge? It seems unlikely. But compared with the state of public sculpture in Łódź – its main streets filled with a hundred or so recent bronzes of local characters – it is at least evidence of a revolution in aesthetics, in favour of sculpture that is dramatic, large-scale, raw and filled with contentious political content.

Monument of the Revolutionary Deed, Łódź

The fact that this is now in a park named after Józef Piłsudski is the clue as to why the 1905 Revolution memorials survive when others do not. Unlike 1917, where the only narrative available is either revolutionary socialism or Russian dominance (as we’ve noted, on dubious historical grounds), 1905 can be spun, not wholly inaccurately, as a ‘springtime of the peoples’. The westernmost peoples in the Russian Empire – Poles and Latvians especially – were among the most revolutionary, the most determined to destroy Tsarism. Although national independence was seldom raised as a slogan, many of those involved – most obviously, Piłsudski himself – would become after 1917 the organizers of actual independence from Russia. And in the other countries (if not Poland) there wasn’t much in the way of nationalist agitation before 1917, and forebears have to be found. So although this was in fact a revolution in which Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians all fought on the same side against a common enemy – and a revolution in which class, with worker set against boss, was paramount – it can be remembered as a revolution against Russian imperialism and absolute monarchy, which it was too. In short, it can be remembered as a national revolution, which is the only acceptable kind, and we can forget about the possibility that national oppression was once linked with class exploitation. Safe in people’s knowledge that revolutionary monuments do not induce revolutionary attitudes by osmosis, they are left alone despite being fundamentally identical to monuments to the revolution that happened twelve years later; and they could be just any other monuments to striving nations, to heroic patriots. As we shall see, they often used the same sculptors anyway.

SOVIET JINGOISM

It is not easy to find monuments that glorify the present possibilities and enjoyments of socialist existence, bar perhaps the various monuments to the space programme. What there is can be particularly unconvincing. In a secluded square just off the central park of Kutaisi, the second-largest city in Georgia, is a Monument to Socialist Labour. Kutaisi is a town where, aside from a few restored central streets and a bizarrely incongruous ultra-modern government headquarters on its outskirts, modernity seems to have stopped in the 1990s, leaving in its absence a strange, jagged chaos of wi-fi-equipped self-built shacks, fences within fences, crumbling apartment buildings and half-finished pavements. It is thus a strange place to find the glorification of Soviet work, or rather the perfect place, depending on your politics. Sitting in between a Stalinist office block and a piquant Art Nouveau cinema, Glory to Work consists of several stepped plinths with figures on top, each of them representing a ‘Hero of Socialist Labour of Our City’. By the time the monument was built in 1985, the official Hero of Socialist Labour award didn’t mean much more in ideological terms than an MBE, so the actual figures on top of each plinth just represent (rather lithe) dancers and suchlike rather than hulking proletarians. In fact, it is only the spatial extravagance of the monument, with its plinths framed by semi-circular stone frames, arranged around each other to form oblique compositions, that suggests it is Soviet at all – it resembles more the post-socialist monuments of the bizarrely successful post-Soviet sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, purveyor of outrageous vitalist kitsch from Cannon Street to the Kremlin, but who began as a bright, talented mosaic artist in Soviet Georgia. This curious, if rather diverting, failure to represent the socialist present convincingly is a reminder that the regime legitimized itself largely on the basis of past victories, more than present achievements. Of those bygone triumphs, none were greater than 1945.

Kutaisi’s Monument to Socialist Labour

The Great Patriotic War of 1941–5 – as opposed to the Second World War of 1939–45 – was, after the revolution itself, the Soviet regime’s greatest legitimation. It is not always remembered as such outside Russia or Belarus (and, to a degree, Ukraine), something which is largely to do with two things: the Cold War, which by now we really ought to have grown out of; and, more understandably, the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, which we will come to. The facts are that the Red Army and the citizens of the Soviet Union suffered more than any other country at the hands of Nazi Germany, and the facts are that they did more than any other country to defeat it, with the overwhelming majority of the fighting in Europe being done by the Soviets. The oft-quoted figure of 20 million Soviet citizens killed is considered by many to be an understatement. And contrary to the stereotype that the killing and the victory were caused by the Russians’ cavalier attitude to human life, with soldiers just being thrown at the Germans and victory resulting from sheer numbers, the greater number of that 20 million were, in most estimates, civilians.¹⁹ It is, then, an indisputable fact that the world was saved from what, in 1940, could have looked like certain Nazi hegemony, almost solely by the actions of the Soviet Union and its people. This sounds like the most absurd propaganda, but it is corroborated by all but the most hostile historians. For all the (understandable) focus on the sacrifices of, say, Poland, the USSR’s contribution was vastly greater. It is impossible to understand anything of what happened next without bearing this in mind.

In addition, the Holocaust began here, when the Einsatzgruppen followed in the rear of the Wehrmacht, capturing Soviet Jews and shooting them en masse in pits, as at Babi Yar in Kiev. In the argument of Arno J. Mayer, the Holocaust and the war against the Soviets were almost inextricably linked as part of what was called ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ – as some still call it in Poland, unironically, Żydokomuna. Irrespective of current, usually geopolitically motivated claims otherwise, there is no serious doubt that Nazi rule was vastly worse than Stalinist rule. The Baltic states, western Ukraine and Poland had communist governments imposed against the popular will, and all faced large-scale deportations of citizens to the Gulag; but Generalplan Ost envisaged these countries’ wholesale clearance, depopulation, deindustrialization and extermination so that they could serve as agricultural German colonies. In Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia they had already got quite far in the attempt. As Richard J. Evans has put it, ‘the Red Army may not have liberated these countries in 1945, but it certainly rescued them.’²⁰ In this context, the least that Europe could have done after the USSR’s collapse was to leave their memorials alone.

However, it isn’t just their Stalinist form that makes this controversial. Partly, it’s the forty-four years of (mostly) imposed communist rule; but, partly, it’s the memory of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, when in 1939 the Nazis and Soviets carved up Eastern Europe between themselves, with the latter taking the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and the strip of Romania that is now Bukovina in western Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova. This gave the USSR most of the territory of the Russian Empire, with only the heart of Poland and nearly all of Finland outside its jurisdiction. Although it could be, and has been, justified as necessary to form a strategic ‘glacis’ against the Nazis – and nobody was under any delusion that war with them would come soon enough – it is obviously and justly seen in those countries as an imperialist act, especially as all of this – with the tiny exception of a sliver of Poland around Białystok, which was returned to Poland – remained part of the USSR after 1945. The problem is that when one side starts calling hypocrisy, other facts might be recalled. It is sincerely believed by otherwise intelligent Poles that the war would not have happened without the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, as if the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, and the occupation and invasion of the Czech lands (not to mention the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Japanese war on China) were all mere minor scuffles. Poland may have reason to forget this, given that it used the Nazi annexation of the Czech lands in 1938 as an opportunity to carve off a Polish-speaking area of Moravia, much as a year later the Soviets would use the Nazi invasion of Poland to carve off its mainly Ukrainian and Belarusian-speaking eastern territories. Countries that ritually denounce the pact often directly benefited from it – the reason why Vilnius is part of Lithuania and Lviv part of Ukraine is their having been carved off from Poland by the Soviets and the Soviet-imposed ethnic cleansing of their largely Polish population. As remembering all of this is extremely uncomfortable, the entire debate can be stopped by the claim, ‘Yeah, but the communists killed more than the Nazis anyway.’²¹ Despite the talk of ‘two totalitarianisms’, anti-communism very frequently spills over into rehabilitation or excuse-making for fascism; it is rare indeed to find a place that can commemorate both truths without any travesty. The nearest thing is in the centre of Kiev, where an obelisk to the Great Patriotic War on a hill above the Dnieper was supplemented recently with a minaret-like sculpture commemorating the great famine of 1932–3, though, even here, both memorials overstep – the war memorial cannot speak of what the Red Army and the NKVD were doing in 1939 and 1940, and the famine memorial throws together the dissimilar Civil War-created famine of 1921 with the undoubtedly exceptional hecatombs of 1933.²² These two hilltop obelisks are as close as anywhere comes to a democratic, unhysterical memorial space acknowledging both sides of the Soviet experience.

Regardless: what is undoubtedly true is that the war was horrifically complex on its Eastern Front, and however much the Soviets were preferable to the Nazis, it is asking too much to expect Poles or Balts to hail them as heroes – which is precisely what these monuments all do. The least morally complicated are those in German territory, at least in ethos if not content. The largest of all war memorials outside the Soviet Union, the combined cemetery and memorial at Treptower Park, in south-eastern Berlin near the River Spree, was the first of these I ever visited, and it is as shocking in its way as the first sight of the Stalinallee. The enormous bronze soldier, baby in hand, foot on a swastika, flanked by red-marble flags (that marble from the Reich Chancellery again) may seem a simple-minded way of commemorating mass death, compared to, say, the laconic, austere First World War memorials of Edwin Lutyens such as the Cenotaph in London or the Thiepval Memorial in northern France. To his immense credit, Lutyens rejected all the attempts to impose Christian or national symbols on these quasi-architectural structures, which instead have about them the sense of almost dumb shock that contemplation of this pointless slaughter induces. They may be massive, imposing and built of stone, they may be beloved of Colonel Blimps, but they do not glorify. Treptower Park shouts its glory from the skies. It could be argued that this was because, unlike the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Berlin did indeed have a purpose. The counter-argument, though, is that the incessant glorification turns all that achievement and sacrifice into a cartoon, a giant three-dimensional war comic.

Look, for instance, at two typical superheroic memorials in Varna, Bulgaria: the Monument to the Anti-Fascist Fighters features two mammoth granite men over a funereal mound, hewn from hulking great stones, robotic-jawed, and incomparable to any imaginable human being. At first you might feel utterly repelled, and refuse to allow yourself to be intimidated or awed by something so melodramatic; circle round it, and you’ll find smaller, narrative reliefs to both the fight against Nazism and the earlier Bulgarian communist uprising of 1923, with the names of the dead on stelae around the memorial’s perimeter – you may also find, as we did, several bouquets of flowers laid at the gate to the mound. These mounds are a regular feature, borrowed from the kurgans, or burial mounds, of the ancient Scythians,²³ and hence religious but not specifically Christian; the most famous Soviet interpretation is Mamayev Kurgan, the centrepiece of the Stalingrad Memorial Complex in Volgograd. Varna has another on a much larger scale, a monument both to the Red Army and to the Russian armies that helped liberate Bulgaria from the Ottomans, on the city’s outskirts, towards the Black Sea resorts, a piled-up overgrown mound featuring more razor-faced supermen, their pupil-less eyes looking out over the sea. The figures are integrated into an abstract concrete sculpture in the form of a partially folded wing. Like the burial sites of a long-abandoned religion, these may be intriguing works of art, but it can be hard to find any emotional or historical connection in them.

A Soviet kurgan, Varna

Elsewhere, the Socialist Realist memorials to the Red Army built in the cities it liberated can be very moving, and sometimes that’s because of their sheer unexpectedness among comfortable European plenty. Some places liberated by the Soviets ended up in Western hands due to prior agreements with the Allies. Chancing upon the Red Army memorial in the Tiergarten, in the affluent part of West Berlin, is a surprise – it was built quickly, before the borders of the four-power control of the defeated capital were drawn. Another capital taken by the Red Army is that shadow socialist city, Vienna, where there is a colossal monument right in the city centre; this one is even a piece of contextual design, with its circus of colonnades rather cleverly placed on the Ringstrasse; the reminder here is how much the shiny affluence of post-war Europe owed to the sacrifices of those men always represented (particularly in contemporary war films like Róża or Joy Division) as bestial, grunting Mongols.

Every Eastern and Central European capital has one in or near its centre. Sometimes, as in the obelisk in the centre of Budapest near the Hungarian parliament (and a statue of Ronald Reagan), they are so Victorian as to directly depict the battle, with the parliament’s Gothic dome visible in the background of the relief sculpture. As the agreement with Gorbachev about their retention was informal, they can be altered – the largest of the Soviet war memorials in Budapest, for instance, had its Red Army soldier removed, leaving only a towering Art Deco female figure holding aloft a laurel; it has also been rhetorically de-Sovietized via the story that the sculptor originally designed the statue for the apparently so much more humane Hungarian leader and Nazi collaborator Admiral Horthy. In Tallinn, the central memorial, a single bronze soldier with bowed head, was removed and taken to a cemetery on the outskirts, sparking riots by Russian-Estonian youth, in a city where they make up nearly half of the population.²⁴ There are three examples worth looking at here, from the various eras of the Red Army monolithic memorial – one, 1950s and Stalinist, in Bratislava; one, 1960s and Modernist, in outer Tallinn; and one, 1980s and neo-Stalinist, in Riga.

Bratislava was taken by the Red Army in April 1945, after a failed anti-Nazi uprising in the city the previous August. The memorial on Slavin Hill was completed in 1960 to mid-1950s designs by the Slovak architect Jan Světlík, and placed at the city’s highest point – but the design in all its fundamentals was actually conceived by the same designer in 1951 to commemorate the rising itself.²⁵ The bulk of the Slovak capital is fairly flat, but at its edges it suddenly lifts itself upwards, forming three acropoli, one with a castle, one with a TV tower, and one which can be spotted from a distance owing to the great obelisk with a man on top at the heart of it. The walk up there takes you through the affluent part of Bratislava, with large villas spreading across winding suburban streets, like a Central European Hollywood Hills; turn around and you have a magnificent view of the chaotic skyline, with sub-Norman Foster blue glass Eurotowers interspersed with Futurist oddities such as the steel-framed upturned pyramid of the Slovak Radio building, with the apparently endless flat slabs of Petržalka behind. The monument itself begins in a clearing between bushes, with twin sets of stairs flanking a relief of Red Army soldiers, one carrying a flag, one of them limping. At this point you can see what is on top of the long, thin obelisk – a soldier waving a flag aloft, with a golden star at its handle.

The Red Army taking Budapest in relief

The building underneath him fuses, in very expensive-looking, high-quality granite (none of that shabby granite cladding you get in the 1970s), two noted authoritarian architectures – the rectangular open columns of stripped classicism and the obelisks of ancient Egypt, with the latter built onto the former, integrated together into a whole. On either side of you are large bronzes of women carrying offerings to the soldiers. Although hardly Modernist, the temple-obelisk has a quality of stern abstraction, a funereal lack of fussiness, that might please an Adolf Loos. Flanking it, reached as always by several flights of polished steps, are soldiers carrying their wounded; on the temple, the names of the battles the Soviets fought in Slovakia, and, on its doors, tiny high-relief figures peculiarly similar to the jolly accordion-playing Russians and Czechs on the National Memorial in Prague, only, this time, showing worn and weary soldiers, public hangings, crying mothers. Bouquets, on the summer afternoon in 2012 we visited, had been laid in front of the doors, and individual flowers were laid on top of some of these figures on the door. Down the hill a little, for those whose consolatory needs are not met by red stars and hammer and sickles, a wooden Orthodox cross has been erected. It’s a great deal more mournful than the vainglorious thunder of Treptower Park and Vienna – almost sensitive, by the standards of Stalinism. Around it, as in all of them, is a mass grave, with only the officers being individually named in the places they were buried – and though there is elsewhere a list of all the dead, this segregation does not appear to be a particularly communist gesture. As Gavin Stamp points out, the Imperial War Graves Commission after 1918 insisted on ‘the crucial principle of equality of treatment, that there was no distinction between the officers and men’.²⁶ With the single exception of the anti-fascist memorial in Varna, you would not find a ‘communist’ memorial that paid the common soldier the same courtesy.

Slavin Hill Memorial Complex, Bratislava

Architecturally speaking, there is a similar relative gracefulness about the memorial on the outskirts of Tallinn, although it is formally completely different. The Red Army memorial at Tallinn-Maarjamäe is on the road which leads along the beach on the Baltic Sea from the Hanseatic centre to the bizarre Olympic architecture of Pirita. It is again in two parts, one of them an obelisk, but this time they serve separate purposes. The obelisk was built to commemorate Red Army soldiers who died here in 1918, during the battles over Estonia between Germany and the Soviets that formed one of the many parts of the Civil War; it was built from local limestone in a much freer style than that in Bratislava, with no neoclassical fluting, but as a sharp, expressionistic limestone spike. The complex around it commemorates the Red Army soldiers that fought over Tallinn in 1941 and 1944, but it doesn’t have any obvious iconography, with nary even a Red Star. It isn’t quite an example of Lutyens-style non-representational sculpture, though. To describe it is more complex than most of these memorials, as it presents different shapes and angles at every point, with no obvious parade route that you’re supposed to take. Carved into artificial hills are triangular limestone stelae, broken in half, with long granite pathways between them. Separating some of these land sculptures are sculptural interventions – an indefinable bronze creature is squeezed, its body torn and twisted, between two of them; on two of them are giant impressed hands. The parades and rituals that have to go here somewhere are provided on each side with steps, which are by now heavily overgrown with grass and weeds. Pushing it even closer to a ‘normal’, non-judgemental, non-side-taking war memorial is a grave for German soldiers, with crosses, just around the corner. The ensemble was designed in 1965 by a large team of architects (Allan Murdmaa, Peep Jänes, Rein Kersten, Henno Sepmann and Valve Pormeister), with the obelisk to 1918 by Mart Port and Lembit Tolli, from 1960. It’s remarkable that designers had such freedom to interpret so hallowed a subject as the Great Patriotic War. This relative freedom in Baltic Soviet design enabled them not just to create a design that pleased them aesthetically, but to try and express the war without throwing heroism or suffering in anyone’s face, something that might be rather crucial given the very different memories.

The War Memorial at Tallinn-Maarjamäe

If the 1960s allowed freedom on this subject, the 1980s certainly did not. Many of the biggest, most seemingly Stalinoid war memorials in the USSR were projects of the late-Brezhnev era, or even from Andropov or Gorbachev’s reforming tenure – products, in short, of a time when that elusive legitimation was desperately needed, with the ideology ever more residual and the economy no longer delivering rising living standards. The main results of this that you can find within the confines of the European Union is the Monument to the Liberators of Riga, completed to the designs of a team led by Ermens Balins in 1985. On the other side of the Daugava river but on an axis with the Freedom Monument erected in the 1930s, it does seem like a pointed gesture, an assertion of Soviet power when it was becoming shaky. It is more dominant and vast in scale than the projects in Bratislava or Tallinn, though the symmetry and great open spaces are familiar from Vienna or Treptower Park – a great square, with two striving heroic figural groups (one of Red Army soldiers, one of Mother Motherland), another central obelisk (or rather a cluster of them) and a pool, unusually, with benches around it. The obelisks are very elegant in their way, formed out of steel, each of a different height, and each part culminating in a star (from the air, uselessly, you would be able to see that the whole complex is in the shape of a star). The obelisks, the best part of the design, are visible from afar. The statues are less inspired, examples of a very common genre – yet while it’s hard to imagine anyone finding this helpful as a way of making them think to any degree about their wartime experiences other than that they were glorious (or, in case you were on the other side, not), there are a lot of fresh flowers left here, for reasons which may become clear when we look at Latvia’s more recent memorial spaces. Seen on its own, it is an image of domination; in its historical context, it’s more an image of insecurity, of a regime that no longer believed in itself.

Mid-1980s Soviet-Heroic war memorial, Riga

Memorials in Russia itself, where there isn’t a colonial aspect as such, are often architectural–sculptural amalgams, reflecting the fact that land nationalization meant the possibility of creating integrated spaces of memory that were at the same time mundane pieces of city infrastructure. The main war memorial in St Petersburg, in the mostly Stalinist-Baroque Moscow District, is framed by two identical skyscrapers, on the model of Kalinin Prospekt, albeit a little more stiff, with a carefully modelled surface. They are supported, Le Corbusier-style, on thin pilotis, as are a series of shops arcing around them. This is the Soviet Union’s take on the International Style, Modernism finally reclaimed as something positive rather than what happens when you strip the ornament off – but it retains monumentality, with the two blocks strictly symmetrical. From here, you must take an underpass to the war memorial which you can see directly in front of you, visible here as a red-granite obelisk framed by a red-marble crescent. Come out of the underpass, and you can see the uncanny symmetricality of the street, each side seemingly identical but for the shop signs and the movements of the people below.

The monument is appropriately subterranean: you are in the open air, but you must step down from the underpass to find it, flanked by concrete walls moulded to look as if they have been smashed into pieces. In the middle are some restrained Socialist Realist figures, as strong and muscular as always but hunched, huddled, starved; the red crescent around them features the gold letters ‘900 DAYS’, referring to the length of time Leningrad was besieged by the Nazis; over a million people died, as they starved the ‘excess mouths’ of the city. Eternal flames flicker from boughs, and behind the figures are three tiny pine trees, placed in alignment with the obelisk. The red-stone crescent is broken in the middle and, behind, you see it is made of the same ‘smashed’ concrete as the steps, here broken in an obvious gesture of architecture parlante; it ‘says’ that the blockade was broken. Of course, it says little about the fact that the leaders of the city during the blockade were purged by Stalin within a couple of years of its ending, but this Victory Monument is nonetheless strangely un-triumphant, mournful. War is not glorious here. When you walk back up the steps onto the surface, two long, low Brutalist buildings are on either side, identical – and all this careful monumentalism suddenly evaporates, as a series of shabby prefabricated towers march their way out towards the forest. Turn around, and there is a sight to take the breath away in awe and in terror. The towers, the obelisk and two groups of figures, alternately downcast or celebratory, are placed on an absolutely precise, straight and symmetrical axis; two figures stand at the base of the obelisk, with ‘1941–1945’ in gold letters at the top. We watched the sun go down here. It wasn’t quite a ‘white night’, a mere 11 p.m. in late May. On this spot, the Soviets attempted to transmute the aesthetic preferences of Peter the Great into something symbolizing the suffering of ordinary people when faced with terror, starvation and atrocity – something which these monumental aesthetics obviously can’t support, geared as they are towards domination and intimidation. The work strains to convey what happened, but it can only create a cartoon. Or can it?

Integration of architecture and sculpture: Victory Monument, Leningrad

ATROCITY EXHIBITIONS

In these giant, half-architectural sculptural groups, there are sometimes hints, or more than hints, of something other than glory and heroism – the horror from which it was inextricable. The hanged soldiers on the doors of the temple at the heart of the Slavin complex, the mute sense of loss in the Maarjamäe monument, are gestures at this; other monuments and memorials from the time make more of a conscious attempt to confront it. One memorial space which moves constantly between triumphalism and horror is the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, in the centre of Kiev. This is perhaps a random example, as there are museums of this kind in practically every city in Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia (though they have been unsurprisingly discontinued in the Baltic states); this happens to be the one that we saw and explored, in spring 2011. It is hard to see anything about it as typical, however, so ludicrously powerful and overscaled is it. You can see the central part of the complex almost anywhere within a three- or four-mile radius – one of the symbolic Mother Motherland figures that were erected on hills from Volgograd to Yerevan, a hard-eyed steel colossus holding aloft a sword and hammer-and-sickle-emblazoned sword. Although its scale and complexity suggest it must have been planned for some years, the Kiev Museum of the Great Patriotic War was completed as late as 1981.

It stands next to an enduring symbolic space of Ukrainian statehood, one of the few surviving structures that was established by Kievan Rus, the literate, advanced, Byzantine-influenced state that was the first ‘Russian’ state of any kind, long before the rise of what nationalists regard as the petty tax collectors for the Golden Horde in Muscovy. This is the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra, a monastery on an escarpment overlooking the Dnieper, made up of a dazzling collection of golden domes, some spreading and Orthodox, some in tight collections in the much later Tsarist Baroque, and some of them reconstructed after 1989. There is another hill just next to the monastery, and on that the city’s planners put the symbolic Soviet space. The contrast between the irregular concatenation of golden domes and the singular steel warrior queen probably did not please traditionalists. However, out of the two it’s the Lavra where I was told to put my camera away, so certain rituals are more enforced than others.

On the ground, there is more happening than the sword-wielding figure apparently nicknamed ‘Tin Tits’. Coming to it from the Lavra, the first part of the complex is an immersive sculptural group, hewn out of grey shutter-marked concrete, which has been shaped into a series of fragmented, clashing and crashing volumes. Here, there’s an unexpected commonality with the ideas being thrown around at the time by ‘Deconstructivists’ in British, American and French architecture schools. For Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman and others, modernity could be properly represented only by a disorienting, smashed-up space, one which Eisenman called, with typical portentousness, ‘non-Euclidian’, where walls, floors, roofs were no longer certain and clear volumes but deliberately unstable, or as unstable as you can make a fixed piece of architecture without it actually falling over. The horrors of the twentieth century were explicitly pointed to as ‘inspiration’, if we can call it that, and it is telling that each of them designed symbolic spaces in post-1989 Berlin, with Libeskind designing the Jewish Museum, which shuns and contorts against a sober neoclassical building, filling itself with rooms whose austerity or angularity are intended to at least slightly evoke the experiences of German Jews, a brave but surely foolhardy move; Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is less didactic, but its succession of hundreds of stelae, placed on a slope, presents a maze which doubles as a place to contemplate the greatest crime against humanity in history and as children’s playground.

Mother Motherland casts her eye over Kiev

There’s no evidence that the designers of the Kiev memorial complex – F. M. Sogoyan, V. P. Vinaikin, V. Borodai and V. V. Schvesov – were remotely aware of this work, but they were clearly trying something similar – to disorient, to shock, to try and make the museum visitor aware that they are entering something which commemorates a period when normality and security no longer applied. You enter into it through an opening in the concrete sculpture, to find walls made up of huge, chopped-off slabs of concrete, whose shuttering marks imply trenches thrown together out of wood; the walls jut out, fall away, and form alcoves and cave-like hideaways. An unconcealed speaker, in a cantilevered concrete box that suggests they were at least aware of the South Bank in London, plays, on loop, ‘The Sacred War’, a terrifying deep-voiced bellow in march tempo that was one of the ‘hits’ of the war, and is a very long way away from ‘We’ll Meet Again’. It sounds like it was sung by the race of giants that populate the Socialist Realist universe, rather than by mere mortals. In those alcoves, triumphalism and horror coexist in the form of bronze groups, emaciated victims and musclebound saviours, mourning women and fist-waving heroes; when we visit, we find a few people are getting their photos taken with these. At the end of the concrete cave, an opening, and another bronze group of soldiers, rifles aloft, about to run towards the shaft of light.

When you emerge, you can see how this extraordinary sculpture is laid into a created landscape, which includes an artificial hill and a circular metal brazier for the eternal flame. A large granite-paved square leads to the museum itself, past some much more conventionally heroic bronze Red Army men suspended on a long concrete float. You don’t notice them first, however; you notice only that you’re now at the foot of Mother Motherland, and that below her, built into the same composition, is the building – again, in an integration of architecture and landscape, with a rectangular building protruding onto the square, and the rest of it covered by grass, but for a circular, buttressed shaft for the statue, which has large windows implying there are exhibits inside. There are only two indications that the Soviet Union no longer exists: the eternal flame doesn’t appear to be burning, and two crossed tanks outside the entrance have been painted in psychedelic colours. The easy, informal way people are using the spaces also feels quite un-Soviet, with children clambering over the bronze giants. There is another hint inside, when the Ukrainian flag flies in the place where a bust of Lenin once stood. Of the rest, I have a 1987 guide to the complex, and on its evidence every one of the exhibits and rooms is exactly the same as it was then.²⁷

Taking snapshots at the Great Patriotic War complex, Kiev

When we first came here in 2010, we didn’t go in, too scared by the sculptural groups surrounding it, not in the mood to be subjected to a monumental programme of Soviet patriotic bombast; we circled round instead, following the stairs that run round it back to the city, and argued with each other about it. Back in Kiev six months later, we swallowed our reservations, bought tickets and entered the first room. The ironwork door to it has a hammer-and-sickle shield on it shaped exactly like the Superman logo. Inside these early rooms, dedicated to the first year or so of ‘their’ war (i.e. 1941, not the to-be-forgotten-about Nazi-sanctioned annexations and battles with Finland, Poland, Romania and the Baltic states in 1939–40), everything is murky, sombre-toned, to evoke the disaster and darkness of this period. As architectural design, it is ambitious, far more so than something like the Moscow Central Museum of the Revolution. There are glass cases containing artefacts, of course – newspapers, pamphlets, possessions – but everything is linked together as a sculptural diorama, suspended in a red-painted steel frame, on an abstract parquet floor; giant photographs of the taking of prisoners-of-war make up two of the walls. Maps, made as colourful sculptural reliefs, show how quickly the Nazis overran Ukraine, and their encirclement of Kiev. One diorama-sculpture shows photographs of murdered Soviet citizens on a stretched piece of greenish-brown canvas fabric and a wooden frame, evoking the camps of the defeated soldiers.²⁸ Another frame, shaped like something between a printing press and a miniature gallows, has hung from it two concentration camp uniforms; another is in a vitrine, with barbed wire run through it. These, it transpires, are authentic.

The next room, on 1943, shows a return of hurrah-patriotism, as Stalingrad turns the tide; over the door is a continuous bronze relief, with the busts of Red Army soldiers and straggle-haired Partisans waving their guns in the air; the flags of Partisans hang from the ceiling. The format is the same, though, with vitrines and more of these dramatic sculptural dioramas (by now often made up of guns or motorbikes) telling the story. It is some measure, perhaps, of the museum’s success in achieving its aims that despite not being able to read Ukrainian (and with only Agata’s primary-school Russian), the narrative was abundantly clear. That may also point to its problems – unlike in the 1930s, the Soviet authorities were no longer broadcasting their propaganda to the illiterate. You know without reading that, here, you are being physically informed of the Soviet war machine and its power, and the maps show the Red Army overrunning occupied Europe. What upends this, and makes it kitsch, is not necessarily the production of a narrative – this is indeed what happened, so why not – but the way that more obvious, ‘realistic’ representations of glory keep having to be thrown in. There are atrocious giant paintings of pitched battles and of the taking of Berlin, with a quality you usually expect from paintings sold on street corners to tourists – overwhelmingly literal panoramic depictions with a God’s eye view. It is at this point, when you feel they are truly ramming their point down your throat, that it’s hard not to think about the thousands of German women that were raped in the aftermath. If someone is screaming at you that they were heroic, it is natural to react with some suspicion. It is striking that when they are throwing together ‘real’ artefacts and these montaged artworks, the museum is moving – you cannot but be aware of the terrifying scale of the sacrifice that these people made, and, given that scale, it’s not surprising that the architecture and design are not in ‘good taste’, but are angry, demonstrative. The inclusion of ‘art’, in the form of the paintings and some more bronze reliefs, cheapens it.

There are two endings to the museum, two Valhallas of the Red Army. The first is laid out in a long, curved room; as everywhere else here, the lighting is exceptionally important, going from the glaring yellow of the rooms on the Battle of Berlin to a dark, funereal tone, with tiny concealed lights. There is a wall covered with photographs of victims – some individual snapshots or passport photos, some entire assembled groups, often of women and children, as in the many Ukrainian villages whose populations were killed in their entirety. A long table stretches in between, without chairs, but with samovars and empty glasses. Trumpets hung from the walls suggest a celebration. There is a record player at the end. Sentimental, perhaps – a room for the commemoration of the dead as a victory party they all couldn’t come to. But the scale, rather than making it risibly authoritarian, makes it moving – the reason why the table is so long is because so many were killed, so it has to stretch all the way around to accommodate them. And for somewhere so didactic, this space does not yell at you. What does yell at you is the last of the rooms, which is above this, in the buttressed rotunda that forms Mother Motherland’s base. This is the Victory Hall, and its marble-and-glass rotunda features a mosaic frieze running round the top, so that you have to crane your neck to see it. Like the Zoloti Vorota Metro station being built at the same time, it shows a renewed interest in the Byzantine aesthetics of Kievan Rus – with mosaics so dripping with gold that an oligarch might find them a bit excessive, every bit as opulent as any in the Lavra, in Hagia Sophia or Ravenna. As in Byzantine art, the figures are stretched and slightly abstracted, though here the inspiration seems to be comic books as much as Andrei Rublev. The Red Army does its heroic deeds and those in mourning are comforted, against a backdrop including the Kremlin and the Dnieper Dam. From one side of the wide glazed windows you can see the Lavra’s domes, and on the other side an unseemly cluster of oligarchical high-rises. Ecclesiastical power, political power, financial power.

For Agata this was the limit, the point where she couldn’t bear the Soviet Valhalla any longer, where its opulence and jingoism became suffocating. We both stared for ages at the mosaics, and she reminded me that I didn’t want to go to the Lavra itself because I thought I’d feel uncomfortable with all the incense, genuflection and serious ritual of an Orthodox service (she did go, and found it wholly unscary). Being in this Soviet Valhalla is probably not unlike the experience of being in an Orthodox cathedral during the Soviet era, when they had been de-sacralized and were essentially used as nothing more or less than art galleries. In those, it was expected that you would enjoy and contemplate the beauty of religious art for its artistic qualities, and for what it said about society, rather than as part of a ritual. Here, too, the ritual has been discontinued, giving a false sense of distance. There were a few visitors wandering in and out of the hall in the time we spent there, and nobody was genuflecting or saluting, but wandering around wide-eyed and a little (but not too) shaken, as they would in a Libeskind museum. This is a ‘doing’ architecture; like the Soviet magic described by Marcuse, it is a ‘performing’ architecture, designed to accompany some sort of act. What it does, and what all the various rooms here do, is evidence of how, even this late, architecture in the USSR was an extreme, Pavlovian form of architecture parlante. Everything is symbolic, everything has a meaning, everything wants you to feel something, a relentless Gesamtkunstwerk of propaganda. The result is that it has become a museum of itself. But here it is, still surviving; apart from in the ex-Hapsburg lands of the West, which had a very different war, most Ukrainians would not dissent from this view of the Great Patriotic War, as something horrifying but necessary and ultimately heroic.

A Soviet Valhalla, Kiev

If that combination has a considerable degree of truth, however much the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact or the mass rape of German civilians might complicate the picture, it was applied elsewhere, in places where an ultimate glorious victory was much less obviously apparent. The famous Holocaust memorial spaces, Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem aside, were erected in the aftermath of 1989, when Western Europe got to newly ‘discover’ its Eastern neighbours, and when travel to the camps and mass graves became much simpler. The Holocaust, however much it may have had considerable assistance from the governments of Europe (and hardly solely its east, see e.g. Vichy France’s total collaboration with it), took place entirely on the territory of what was at that point Poland and the USSR, something which leads to the oft-used phrase, and offensive canard, that talks of ‘Polish concentration camps’. The mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen took place mostly on Soviet territory; the death camps were in occupied Poland. Large cities in both countries had ghettoes into which Jews were herded before being exterminated – Białystok, Łódź, Warsaw, Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga, Minsk. Anti-Semitism would recur, appallingly, in the post-war period – the Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia in 1951, Stalin’s purge against the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1952, and Mieczysław Moczar’s threats to Polish Jews in 1968 were breathtakingly cynical, depressing proof that anti-Semitism didn’t need many actual Jews to continue; and hence there was mass emigration of Jews from both countries in the late 1960s and 1970s, and again after 1991. At the same time, reactionary popular memory – sometimes, as in the Baltic states, reactionary official memory – indelibly associates Jews with communism. However, this shouldn’t suggest that the areas where Jews were massacred were not memorialized in the USSR or the People’s Republic of Poland – they were, especially as even in the pogrom atmosphere of Stalin’s last years anti-Semitism was always officially condemned. However, they had to be fitted into a narrative of ‘glory’ and, in Poland, ‘martyrdom’.

In some places this move was easier than others – most clearly, in the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. This was erected early, in 1947, to the designs of the sculptor Nathan Rapoport, and it does refer to an indisputably heroic event. The Ghetto’s inhabitants had mostly been deported to the death camp at Treblinka by the time it occurred, and the less than a thousand remaining took up arms, in a hopeless act that it nonetheless took the Nazis a month to suppress.²⁹ Notoriously, they fought alone, with only the most perfunctory co-operation from the Poland-wide Home Army. The memorial is unambiguous, and is remarkable among Soviet-era monuments for featuring explicitly religious symbolism, in the form of the menorahs that are placed at either side of its thick granite frame. Inset on each side of this large grey block are two bronze high-relief sculptures. The side facing the large square behind is completely Socialist Realist, pulled into a Mannerist composition of emaciated bodies, one carrying a child, others carrying grenades and knives; one is lying, crushed. On the other side, facing the street, is a classical mourning procession. It was here that Willy Brandt fell to his knees in supplication, on a state visit to Poland in 1970.³⁰ Elsewhere in the Ghetto are many other monuments, mostly created after 1989, but this is ‘the’ monument. It sits strangely here because it is not part of the Polish war narrative, but of an Israeli post-war one – there are always large Israeli tour groups in buses visiting. The Łódź Ghetto, too, has its monuments and memorials, though they are less a part of the itinerary. Both ghettoes were razed to the ground, and both are now poor, inner-city districts made up of an uneasy mix of unfinished Socialist Realist grands projets and Modernist estates. In both cities, the outlines of the Ghetto are shown on the pavement, so that they are in a sense wrapped by a continuous memorial. But, within that, there are completely normal, working-class Polish districts – the one in Łódź, unsurprisingly, noticeably a lot poorer. Among the memorials there is one sculptural group on the site of a concentration camp solely for the incarceration of children; at any one point there were 1,500 children here, whose ages ranged between two and seventeen. Like the Warsaw Ghetto memorial, it is in some way integrated into the area around, a quite pleasant, almost Scandinavian district of Modernist blocks in green space, albeit one neighboured by derelict pre-war tenements and seedy Socialist Realist half-boulevards. In this 1971 design by Jadwiga Janus and Ludwik Mackiewicz, an elevated plaza features a curved, heartshaped structure made up of two metal wings, broken by the imprint of a starved child. Small, spiky stelae, running alongside the garages of the flats, carry the names of the death camps to which many of the children were taken. It is an eerie, original piece of abstract sculpture, but it’s completely unable to give even slightly a sense of the horror of what happened here, and how could it?³¹

Children’s Camp Memorial, Łódź

This is unsurprisingly even more the case with the death camps themselves. When we went to Lublin in January 2013 neither of us had ever visited any of their remains – we hadn’t taken up the offer so frequently advertised in Kraków for package tours of ‘Ghetto, Auschwitz, Salt Mine’. The death camp of Majdanek, however, is in the suburbs of Lublin, a ten-minute tram ride, and for some reason – not for the sake of this book – we decided to go there. It is most definitely not a place which it is advisable to visit, as we did, in temperatures of –10°C, but it is an open question as to whether it should be visited at all. Unlike all the other death camps, it is surrounded by the suburbs of a medium-sized city, on all sides. What announces the death camp to the suburban street is the Monument to Struggle and Martyrdom, designed by Wiktor Tołkin in 1969. It consists of a Monument-Gate, a Mausoleum, and a Road of Homage and Remembrance, which connects them, spanning the length of the camp, whose primitive wooden buildings are mostly preserved, unusually, since the camp was liberated by the Red Army before the Germans had the chance to clear away evidence, as they had to some extent in Treblinka, Sobibor and other extermination camps. It was funded by a Polish institution called the Council for the Protection of the Remembrance of Combat and Martyrdom,³² but, mercifully, none of the monuments pretend that there was anything heroic happening here.

The Monument-Gate is huge, and hideous, as it should be. It is entirely abstract, a scream of concrete and rubble suspended over a slope lined with rubble (which now has a sign in front of it to stop visitors from falling in), contorted forms which look like giant three-dimensional letters, intended to read as the Hebrew letters for ‘Lublin’, but cracked and smashed into illegibility – in its refusal of any consolation, any reference or any representation, it is less sentimental, less obvious, than the 1990s architecture of American academicians, although even then there’s a question about whether or not tortured sculpture is of any use for the representation of actual torture, as if an unpleasantly dissonant experience is in any way comparable to those actual experiences; but this attempt at the impossible has more conviction than most. You can, if you want, walk straight from it to the Tołkin-designed mausoleum, but another pathway leads into the remains of the camp itself. Majdanek was, like the much larger Auschwitz, both a death camp where Jews were gassed, and a ‘regular’ concentration camp where political prisoners and deportees were kept. There are exhibits in the surviving huts, so cold that it must have been difficult enough not to simply freeze to death. They are sparse, laconic; and the doors are open, so that you can walk quite without thinking about it into a tiled room without realizing that you’ve walked into a former gas chamber. The signs, in German, have been kept, as have the watchtowers, like all of the buildings in a quickly hurried-together wooden non-architecture, with some brick in the crematoria. From here, we got to the mausoleum. I later found that the design was based on an ancient Slavic burial urn, which is perhaps inappropriate given that 60,000 of the camp’s 80,000 victims were not ‘Slavic’, but the form is not didactic enough for this to be obvious. An inscription across its circular limestone cap reads ‘Our Fate is a Warning to You’. Underneath that, unexpectedly and horrifyingly, is a mound of human ashes.

The Monument-Gate at Majdanek, Lublin

Although it’s debatable whether any aesthetic, any kind of architecture, has a chance at what is, even at best, making art out of atrocity, it’s arguable Soviet aesthetics couldn’t cope with the Final Solution for similar reasons that Marxists of the time – with certain exceptions, such as Trotsky or Adorno – could not understand the reality of Nazi anti-Semitism. It was the norm to see it as a mere scapegoating that cloaked a new form of monopoly capitalism, rather than as a distinct phenomenon with its own, psychotically irrational, momentum. In much the same way, it resists being slotted into the Soviet narrative. The Holocaust did not involve ‘heroism’, and the victims and their families would be hard pressed to call any of it an act of ‘martyrdom’ – too senseless, too incomprehensible. To this there is one exception, perhaps. The story of the Minsk Ghetto is one of the least remembered of the era, and according to its main English-language historian that’s because of its atypicality.³³ For diverse reasons – a less horrific experience of Stalinism than had neighbouring Ukraine, meaning Belarusians had internalized official Soviet values of ‘internationalism’, plus, perhaps crucially, an absence of any large-scale nationalism in Belarus itself – there was huge co-operation between the Ghetto, the rest of the city’s underground and the Partisan movement in the forests. The Nazis’ attempt to set up a reliable collaborative Judenrat to enforce their rule in the Ghetto failed, with its leaders consistently working with the resistance. Tens of thousands were smuggled out of the Ghetto to the forests. In the politics of history, they weren’t useful to any side: too communist for the Americans, they were not left to fight alone so weren’t much use to Israel; and in the USSR they were not officially acknowledged until the 1960s, because the resistance movement had not been officially sanctioned, unsurprisingly given that the local Party leadership had fled the Nazis with great speed. The many memorials in Belarus’s capital include sculptural groups, Metro stations and, fittingly, an underground eternal flame. These memorials to internationalism survive partly because of Belarus’s faintly neo-Soviet regime, yet its absolute leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, publicly condemned Jewish tourists in 2007 for making a Belarusian town a ‘pigsty’, and asked ‘rich Jews’ to visit instead. Memorials evidently can’t enforce politics.

Maybe, as the American architects who became the memorialists of the 1990s and 2000s made clear, it really is pointless to figuratively represent the unrepresentable. In that case, following Adolf Loos, who once claimed that ‘architecture’ in mausolea was one of the few occasions where it was justified, you can sometimes find more successful examples in the cemetery. At the main cemetery in Kiev, there is a ‘Park of Memory’, whose design is so abstracted and haunting that it was picked as a (back) cover image for one of the recent Totally Awesome Ruined Soviet Architecture books. We went looking for it in March 2011. The first thing we noticed in this big municipal cemetery was the complete and total lack of even the slightest maintenance. It is interesting to see what a cemetery looks like when it really isn’t maintained. The Victorian cemeteries of the UK are full of picturesque delights such as ivy-covered headstones and trees growing out of the heads of angels, but the pathways are impeccable and the rubbish left by courting Goths is always thoroughly cleared up.

Here, however, in a cemetery where there are clearly some very recent graves, with fresh new headstones, all the pathways between are the setting for mud and trash, fighting for control of these routes. Rubbish of all sorts – the usual bottles, packets and plastic products, but with a large amount of toilet paper also scattered around, perhaps as an abortive means of clearing up the mess. The mud itself, congealing with the remains of the thawing snow, is of fairly apocalyptic proportions, necessitating wellingtons at the very least for all but the insensible or those promised fine avant-garde architecture and the warm glow instilled by a sense of achievement at the end of it. As if in response to this, several of the graves are marked off by low walls, which unfortunately makes negotiation of the place even more impossible. But after a few minutes, and having decided not to try and escape in the other direction, we got used to it, and admired the gravestones. Many of them are mini versions of the Soviet memorial genre, partly no doubt due to the need for secularized forms of remembrance. There are a lot of black and red marble or granite wedges, some of them carrying heroic images of those underneath; in some cases there are small statues of the dead, one in Komsomol dress. The 1970s grave of the Didichenko family is a small piece of concrete abstraction, two volumes held in tension. Later graves are more obvious, for obvious reasons – that is, they’re crosses – and in some cases, wooden crosses appear to have been added later to 1970s and 1980s memorials. Earlier, pre-Soviet monuments of lesser rectitude can be found here too; a classical sarcophagus looking disapproving among these atheists.

Then we came to a clear main road, and in the distance what looked like what we’d seen in the glossy book. Our optimism was justified when we reached the entrance pavilion, a very sober structure compared with what comes next, but nonetheless recognizable as consciously thought-out architecture in a way that little else here is. Its forms initially seem very abstract – subtle curves and small windows, white render on concrete – but there is also an attempt here at a non-referential ornament. Over one doorway, the concrete suddenly bulges, curves and billows into some peculiar fleshly opening. This is the first indication that the Park of Memory’s designers, the architect Abraham Miletsky and artists Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnychenko (who drew on their earlier, unbuilt competition project for a memorial at the ravine of Babi Yar), were concerned to evoke the sacred without using any obvious religious symbolism. Recent additions have no such compunction – the adjacent door to this is decorated with tacked-on, bright Orthodox icons.

Yet the original designers’ more subtle symbolism is not removed, not yet – a bundle of concrete forms sits next to the sign towards the crematoria, and you notice something else. A rippling, flowing wall of concrete, enclosing a clearly very recent toy Orthodox church, its onion dome the pinnacle of a small, modest building that thankfully doesn’t proclaim the Restoration as loudly as it might. It’s that concrete wall that dominates, though, curving all the way round a small moat, accidentally forming a micro-acropolis for that church to sit on. Concrete it may be, but the wall looks completely organic, its curves so irregular that they can’t possibly be the result of deliberate architectural intent. Although it’s represented as wholly abstract in the coffee-table book we were using as a guide, it transpires that the concrete wall is an accident.³⁴ The bulging, curving wall was originally a huge relief sculpture, depicting the horrors of the twentieth century: of which there were many here, with the extermination of its large Jewish population at Babi Yar in 1941, or the famine of 1933, or the mass murders of the 1937 Great Purge. In the surviving photographs of the wall under construction, you can see all of this featured and evoked on the relief, a vast tapestry of pain that was here only for a couple of years before being replaced by the concrete abstraction we see here today. Somewhere, underneath it, the sculptures are still there and still recoverable. Even when at their most abstract, then, Soviet architects could not resist architecture parlante; and, sometimes, what they had to ‘say’ was not welcome.

The crematoria have a ceremonial approach, one which bypasses Christian iconography altogether and reaches back to the pagan. A hill fort, more or less – a great circus, a mound of earth, or rather of overgrown grass and the usual windswept rubbish, which you approach up a flight of steps; the tops of the cupolas are visible from here, a set of domes and flames. From the top of these steps, you see the crematorium buildings’ tight circle surrounded by an earthwork fortification, stepped upwards for ease of access, planted with fresh flowers, hundreds of stones and little memorials. Or, rather, we noticed this somewhat later, as the crematoria are so compelling. There are three actual ‘buildings’ here, shallow structures which one could imprecisely call domes, were they not so organically cast. They face each other with perfect symmetry, sentries in worn, white-rendered concrete, their shells rising from doorways of roughly person height, swooping upwards and then down in a biomorphic, maternal curve. Guarding them in turn are purely sculptural, sometimes uninhabited concrete forms which flicker, twist and taper upwards and outwards, marking out the space of a memorial stone. The entrances to the three buildings take the organic metaphors and make it clear that the inspiration is human, not animal; if these double-curves resemble female body parts, the doorways appear as faces, with mouths, eyes, noses and even fancifully a glazed hairline. Sexual metaphors might seem bizarre and inappropriate in a space devoted to death, but they’re abundant in the crematorium’s inexplicable ancillary rooms and spaces, which feature vulval openings towards their pinnacles. Look at them from another angle, however, and they resemble a wailing wall of anthropomorphic forms, twisting and turning in agony, their mouths open in pain. The main moulded metal doorways, through which the mourners pass, are imposingly deathly.

Even without the sculptures, this is still a speaking architecture, as much as any other more conventional, more conformist Soviet public building. The atheistic sacred that these concrete forms aim to evoke is captured on one level by a frank paganism – metaphors of weeping and contemplation for death, evocations of sex and pregnancy for rebirth; and it is surely this conception of cyclical, carnal life that necessitates the newly built Orthodox church to stand guard, as much as the now freely expressed faith of the mourners. The designers evidently took extremely seriously the requirement to create a non-confessional, non-sectarian, even non-mystical form of sacred architecture without the recourse to the conventional forms of Soviet ritual, and the concreting over of the relief forces it to do so without recourse to any conception of the political or historical. That doesn’t mean the latter are wholly absent. In a sense, what the designers were trying to do here is what Eisenman, Libeskind and those other ‘architects of mourning’ attempted with their volumes evoking war or the Holocaust; but there are no obvious triggers, no big dark room to be locked into in which to contemplate the cattle trains (or rather, here, no deep ravines in which to contemplate the Einsatzgruppen). At the same time, even with the relief sculpture which was intended to animate it left blanked out, this is impossible to conceive as a normal, straightforward space of mourning and commemoration. In all its abstraction, it could only exist in a city which has faced extraordinary suffering. It is abstract, but it is not mute.

Two views of the Park of Memory, Kiev

ANTI-COMMUNIST MONUMENTS

There are many Museums of Communism in Europe, and they are at their most wilfully frivolous in cities that are regularly visited by Western tourists – in Berlin, where the GDR is two things, the Stasi and cutely clunky consumer goods; in Tallinn, where the Soviet Union is the KGB and cool pop-art adverts for products you couldn’t buy in shops; and in Prague, where the museum takes the form of an attic full of tat pointedly advertised as being ‘next to McDonald’s’. Others have more serious ambitions – to provide spaces of public memory, or to set up new national narratives. Some of these anti-communist spaces are much more ambitious as architecture, and paramount among these is the Statue Park in Budapest, set up in the outer, outer suburbs of Buda in 1993, the greatest of what Agata Pyzik describes as the ‘zoos’ and ‘monument graveyards’ that can be found also in the Gru¯tas Park in Lithuania (better known as ‘Stalin World’), or in the Park of Fallen Monuments in Moscow.³⁵ The last, looked over by a ludicrous Postmodern monument to Peter the Great and in front of the New Tretiakov Gallery, one of the most impressive high-Modernist buildings in the city, is particularly weird, given that – the decisively demounted Brezhnev and Stalin aside – most of its subjects can be found in abundance left around in the city. A few hammer-and-sickles, Lenins, Dzerzhinskys and such are ‘fallen’ here, but many more are still in their original place in the Russian capital – a ten-minute walk from the park and you’ll spot in situ a Lenin as well as a Georgi Dimitrov, and can descend into a Metro station watched over by a heroic space-age worker couple. This schizophrenia is not atypical.

In Budapest, however, there really are no, or nearly no, communist monuments on show in the city centre, apart from the small obelisk near the parliament or the de-Sovietized liberation monument on Gellert Hill. The Red Army soldier that originally appeared below the goddess of peace in the latter can be found in the Statue Park. It is so far from the centre of the city, quarantined away in a green belt past even the Plattenbau blocks, that its original ambitions to be a memorial space for both former Eastern Bloc citizens and tourists seem unlikely to be fulfilled. There are adverts for it on the Metro, in English, and the bus stop for the only bus that goes there is also given a specially illustrated English signpost. The park was designed in 1993 by the architect Ákos Eleőd. The architecture is Postmodern classicism, not in the popular, kitsch, classicism-in-fibreglass sense so present in Moscow – though there’s a fabulously horrible example of that in the new National Theatre in Pest – but in a more serious vein, with its porticos and pediments constructed out of industrial red brick as a literal stage set, demonstratively without actual buildings behind their façades, with the columns holding up nothing. Into these spaces are placed the removed statues, in a particular order, in a taxonomy much as we’ve tried to follow in this book – monuments to the Fathers of the Workers’ Movement here, to the Workers’ Heroes there, to the Red Army and Lenin elsewhere, and with a special place for the commemoration of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and the ‘counter-revolution’ of 1956.

Anti-Stalinist satirical classicism at Budapest’s Statue Park

According to Eleőd, ‘in order to build a counter-propaganda park out of these propaganda statues, and in order to faithfully follow the Dictatorship-like way of thinking and its inherited recipe, I had to create this park with more direct, more drastic, more up-to-date devices’ – i.e. the emptinesses, the lacunae, the holes in the classical buildings have the role of encouraging criticality and thought, rather than just presenting a Stalinist horrorshow. It is placed on an axis, where flanking ‘buildings’ reveal, through the bare portico, the severed legs of Stalin; the only ‘fake’ monument here, made in reference to the destruction of the Stalin statue during the 1956 revolution. The only text, other than the plaques, is a poem, ‘A Word on Tyranny’, by the communist turned dissident Gyula Illyés. ‘This park is about democracy,’ Eleőd continues, because ‘only democracy can give us the chance to think freely about dictatorships.’ Does it elicit thought, or does it just elicit ‘Wow’ or ‘What were they thinking?’ ‘Inevitably, in a tourist from another country, to whom dictatorship means nothing more than at most a reading experience [and here we are!], very different thoughts arise than in a person with a tragic past, who lived here, lived through hard times, carrying the drama of his own broken life under these statues into the park. But silence is common.’³⁶ Silence is indeed common, and so is taking lots of pics of yourself gesticulating next to these giant gesticulators. We did.

As the removal in Budapest has been so complete, or so indiscriminate – even Warsaw has more Soviet statues left in place – it can be a little unnerving seeing how every part of the twentieth-century socialist experience has been thrown in here. Marx and Engels of course, and it’s a waste of breath maybe to argue how little they have to do with what happened in Hungary more than a half-century after their deaths; there’s a lot of the Soviet Republic of 1919, which was hardly a Russian imperial project, as the Red Army couldn’t then have got to Hungary even if it had wanted to, but was an indigenous Hungarian revolution, and one which had mass support in Budapest itself, and which was overthrown by the Romanian army, not by any Hungarian movement against it – and which was replaced by a violently anti-Semitic right-wing dictatorship. That doesn’t make the monuments to it any less absurd, and its largest fallen monument, a 1986 sculpture of Béla Kun and the Magyar Red Army by Imre Varga, is indeed completely preposterous, a cluster of little leaping tin soldiers, deliberately thin and left un-fleshed out, which suggests that late ‘real socialist’ sculptors could do Postmodernism as well as any post-communist space of sober memory. But also in here is a monument to the 1,200 Hungarian volunteers who fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, in a decent, abstracted bronze of three soldiers next to plinths with the battles they took part in, to the designs of Agamemnon Makrisz, in 1968. It forms part of the park dedicated to the ‘unending promenade of workers’ movement concepts’. There are monuments to the surely wholly admirable, selfless gesture of the International Brigades in most other countries that had a workers’ movement – there is an equally large one on London’s South Bank, and a smaller one in my hometown, Southampton, among numerous others. But, here, the International Brigades are just another part of a spurious promenade of fake heroism.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, alongside the transformation of communism into a horror-reservation, there’s a conspicuous failure in the Hungarian capital to commemorate Hungary’s experience of fascism, which culminated in the extermination of 70 per cent of Hungarian Jews. In a country where the hard-right interwar dictator Admiral Horthy is immortalized and the third-largest party is openly neo-fascist and anti-Semitic, this matters. As an extant movement, Soviet-style communism is stone dead in contemporary Eastern Europe, bar maybe its undeath in the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Russia; but fascism most certainly isn’t. And the sculptors who once designed glowering Lenins and musclebound workers now devote their talents to edifices representing the likes of Admiral Horthy, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the Latvian dictator Kārlis Ulmanis and the Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, none of them ‘democrats’ in any sane sense of the word. The statues are often in the same style, in the same red granite, on the same angular abstract plinths with realist busts and statues built in. Often, looking at one of the many looming bronze Piłsudskis in Poland, it’s only the peaked cap and the more luxurious facial hair that make it clear you’re not looking at a Lenin. Though the official ideology is to reject both ‘totalitarianisms’, in practice their conflation is very frequently packaged with the rehabilitation of right-wing authoritarianism.

If fascism’s victims are ever commemorated in post-communist Europe, it’s usually in the form of museums that put together the ‘two totalitarianisms’. In Budapest, the central House of Terror (actually called this), is in the building on Andrássy út where the Gestapo and then the Hungarian secret police, the AVO, had their offices. In the Baltic states, there are museums to the ‘Double Genocide’, and the Lithuanian one is also in an office block that was used as a torture chamber by both the Gestapo and the KGB. On that level, the desire to place the two regimes in alignment is understandable, but what is the word ‘genocide’ doing here? Both Latvian and Lithuanian official histories use this term to refer not merely to the actual genocide of Baltic Jews – for which reason there are now nearly no Jews at all in such former ‘Jerusalems of the North’ as Vilnius, Kaunas, Daugavpils and Riga – but also to the genocide of Lithuanians and Latvians, which seems contradicted by the continued existence here of Lithuanians and Latvians. The term hasn’t been wholly pulled out of nowhere, but refers to the mass deportations of potential ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in the Baltic states under Stalin’s rule. These were appalling crimes under any possible interpretation of international law, and many died in the transport to Siberia, but these people were not all shot in pits or gassed in vans and chambers. In fact, most survived. It is not the same thing. Nonetheless, denying ‘both’ genocides is illegal under Lithuanian law, so we’d best be careful.

A typical space for remembering the ‘Double Genocide’ is the Occupation Museum in the centre of Riga. We have come across this already, as the central building in the reconstructed Riflemen’s Square, surrounded by contemporary and Stalinist interpretations of historical architecture. The building, originally the Museum of the Red Riflemen, was designed in 1969, by the architects Dzintars Driba and Gunārs Lūsis-Grīnbergs. As an exterior structure, it is harsh, with an almost windowless copper-panelled façade; in front of it is a statue of the ‘Riflemen’, appearing as superhuman sentries standing at the gates to the city, at the point where the main road bridge over the Daugava connects it to the centre. Because of that the museum is ‘the’ entry to Riga’s Old Town, and accordingly its façade is often covered with giant adverts to the road. Before we can think about the building’s current purpose, we need to know who these statues are, and what the museum was devoted to previously.

The Museum of the Red Riflemen/The Museum of Occupations, Riga

It was not devoted to the Great Patriotic War, during which Soviet-occupied Latvia was then occupied by the Nazis, but to the tens of thousands of Latvians who fought on the side of the Bolsheviks in the ‘Russian’ Civil War, between 1917 and 1921. They gained a reputation for ferociousness; after he survived an assassination attempt, Lenin’s personal guard was a detachment of Latvians. Many later took high positions in the Party and state (including, notably, the ‘organs’) before being decimated by Stalin, who specifically targeted Latvians, as he did Poles and Germans or any other foreign-born communists during the purges of 1936–8. The Riflemen, made up of divisions which had gone over to the Bolsheviks during the collapse of the Eastern Front in the First World War, were not alone in Latvia in their enthusiasm for communism. In the Constituent Assembly elections of late 1917, the Bolsheviks took 72 per cent of the vote. Latvia, as one of the most industrially developed areas of the Russian Empire, had been one of their strongholds since 1905. A brief Soviet Republic was set up here in 1919, and defeated only by foreign intervention. So this is not a monument to an ‘occupation’, but to Latvians’ widespread participation in the October Revolution, something which even nationalist historians do not dispute. Like all Soviet jingoist monuments, it is hard to connect the deeds – not always heroic, and civil wars tend not to be – and the unambiguous representation of these red-granite cybermen.³⁷ As a composition, it is very powerful. It is placed on one side of the low, intersecting volumes of the museum, and Riga Cathedral’s spire emerges on the other side. The imposing asymmetrical alignment would be even more clear, but for the reconstructed Blackhead’s House emerging just behind. It is, in the original, one of the Soviet structures that sets up a dialogue between ‘heritage’ as in great monuments, and ‘heritage’ as in the workers’ movement, the state’s official legitimation.

There are proposals to reclad half of the museum in mirrorglass and white tiles, so that its new purpose is more signposted, but at the moment the exterior of the Museum of Occupations is untouched, in contrast to the interior, where the occupations of Latvia by the Nazis and by the Soviets are treated oddly asymmetrically. In the fifty pages of the English-language catalogue, which gives a sense of the balance of the contents, there are just five pages on the Nazi occupation, in which there are three short paragraphs on the Holocaust, one of which is devoted to denying the existence of Latvian anti-Semitism.³⁸ Regardless, nearly all of Latvia’s 70,000 Jews were killed, most of them before the Nazis even officially instituted the Final Solution at the Wannsee conference. There may perhaps not have been a ‘history’ of pogroms in Riga before the 1940s, but this didn’t stop the Arajs Kommando, one of the most notorious collaborationist forces in occupied Europe, from doing much of the killing, here and elsewhere. The commando would later form the backbone of a Latvian SS legion, which the museum is at pains to point out was not involved in any atrocities, and was partly conscripted; glossy books in the shop show photographs of this rebranded ‘Latvian Legion’, their Swastika armbands proudly on display on the cover, along with apologetic commentary. Nearly everything is translated into English, as if they’re very keen to make clear to visitors what happened here. If the Nazi occupation is skirted over, there is much, much more on how the Soviet occupation turned Latvia into an economic basket case and a colony, one where the Russian population – making up around half of the city’s residents – still resist learning Latvian, and want Russian as an official second language. The museum is not about the past but about this present, and it is quite categorical about that. This is easily as gross as any Soviet instrumentalization of history, and it should be possible to say so.

There’s little doubt that Latvia was treated in a colonial fashion under the USSR,³⁹ and the emigration of Russian workers was one facet of this, though it’s doubtful they benefited from it much. There’s also no doubt that under Stalinism Baltic peoples were subject to harsh repression, as were others, Russians included. But as the writer Otto Latsis, whose family had been communists since the 1910s, pointed out, even under Khrushchev Latvia’s Communist Party was purged after it attempted a ‘national communist’ orientation, trying to limit Russian migration. Gratuitously, even harmless festivals such as the Feast of St Ivan were banned. So the use of the word ‘occupation’ is fair. But it is not fair to argue that both occupations were equal and equivalent. In the context of the Latvian independence movement in 1990, Latsis asserted that ‘it is a ludicrous idea’ to argue, as the official histories then did, that the occupation of Latvia was voluntary or caused by revolution in Latvia itself. ‘Serious analysis shows there was no revolutionary situation at all, though there was a high level of discontent with the reactionary Baltic regimes … such arguments only make people realize that they are being treated as idiots.’ He had equally harsh words for the notion that Latvia was still ‘occupied’ fifty years later. ‘Am I not also being treated as an idiot by those whose talk of “occupation” stubbornly equates the events of half a century ago with those of the present? If there were an occupation regime in place today, even the mildest criticism would be forbidden.’⁴⁰

So why the harshness, why the insistence that the Soviet occupation needs much more space and attention than the German? There is a slip of paper, in English, available at the entrance to the museum, which explains this. ‘One of Latvia’s greatest strengths, its welcoming attitude and openness to others, is becoming its greatest weakness, as others exploit that openness to change what it means to be Latvian in ways that subvert the nation and allow others to dominate it … now it is so obvious that no one concerned about Latvia and Latvians can afford to ignore it.’⁴¹ What might this sudden change be? Conceivably, the election of a Russian-speaking mayor the same year, when the largest party in the parliament was a pro-Russian coalition that included post-communist parties such as the Social Democrats and the Latvian Socialist Party, the batter led by Riga’s 1980s mayor, Alfreds Rubiks. This in itself was remarkable given that a large proportion of the Russian-speaking population are denied citizenship, having to pass a complex naturalization test if they want to vote in general elections. ‘Changing what it means to be Latvian’ is code for accepting that Latvian Russians are also Latvian.

So we have a museum that is extremely interventionist, as determined to make a polemical point as any under the USSR. History remains a tool, to be used according to whoever the enemy is at any given time. Estonia, too, has a similar citizenship regime to Latvia and an Occupation Museum, and typically for contemporary Estonia it’s a much more interesting piece of architecture than you would find in Riga, a subtle, secluded neo-Brutalist building, a glass pavilion framed by steel diagonals, rising from a raw concrete base. Nearby is the empty space where the Red Army’s less tasteful memorial, the ‘bronze soldier’, stood until its removal in 2007. The Estonian artist Kristina Norman notes that ‘back then the education system was supposed to make “Soviet people” out of youngsters, today the aim instead is to produce an “Estonian-mindedness” ’;⁴² in this context, ‘the current political power constructs and redefines their historical, foreign and internal enemies for populist reasons. At the same time, they are carrying out a policy of the intensification of national identity, and in this process monuments have become visual instruments.’ She recalls that her – Russian-speaking – parents voted for Estonian independence, as did 150,000 other ‘Russians’. However, they did not get citizenship in the new state, unlike the descendants of anyone who lived there before 1939. In that context, the old Soviet monuments ‘filled a gap that was left after the positive identity for the Russian-speaking population had disappeared’. When the Red Army memorial was removed in 2007, the rioting Russian youth targeted for particular violence a boutique/luxury office complex. The rioters were known to have come from microrayons on the outskirts of Tallinn. But these acts of ‘class’ were immediately subsumed into ‘nation’, with support from the Kremlin’s youth movement, the ‘Nashi’, and chants of ‘Russia! Russia!’ The invasion of the microrayons into the tourist centre became the invasion of the Russians.

The maintenance of nationalism as the only acceptable frame is enforced on both sides; during the riots, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves was quoted as saying that, for Estonians, ‘our people were not murdered by communists or Nazis, but by Germans and Russians’.⁴³ This discourse is ubiquitous in the Baltics. How to explain all the seeming evidence that in 1917 a lot of Latvians supported the Bolsheviks, and in 1941 many appeared to support the Nazis? The answer could not possibly be that factory workers in Riga were convinced socialists, like workers in St Petersburg, Berlin or Paris around the same time; it cannot possibly be that many young people in Riga, as in Vichy, Rome or Berlin, were adherents of fascist ideology. One recent Latvian book – translated, like so many in the Occupation Museum, into English – on wartime propaganda argues that ‘the ideas of the Bolsheviks gained resonance’ because ‘they promised Latvian autonomy’, and that while the Latvian SS ‘technically fought against the allies, the majority of legionnaires did not wish to fight for Hitler and the Nazis, but rather against the USSR and Stalin’. Somehow it all seems to become acceptable if it’s in the service of the nation. The result is not merely the existence of new spaces of memory – as politically pointed adaptive reuse in Vilnius or Riga, as bunker-chic in Tallinn, but also a spatial segregation, which even the casual observer can notice. Seldom did we hear Russian in the Old Towns of Tallinn and Riga, seldom did we hear Estonian in Pirita or Latvian in the Maskavas District; sometimes both cities can feel like a prettier Belfast. The memorial politics of these cities are, in this context, extremely undemocratic.

What makes the new memorial spaces in the Baltic countries so uneasy is that sense of special pleading, the attempt to at once conflate the two ‘totalitarianisms’ while exonerating their local auxiliaries. The rhetoric is always in terms of ‘Well, you may have heard that we all collaborated with the Nazis’ – (while, of course, most foreign visitors have no idea) – ‘but in fact, we only did so because of the Soviets.’ Obviously there’s less of this touchiness in Warsaw, capital of the country that proudly didn’t collaborate with either of the two totalitarianisms.⁴⁴ There are abundant memorial spaces to the Home Army, by far the largest of the three clandestine armies that resisted the Nazis (the other two forces, made up respectively of Polish communists and fascists, are unsurprisingly less remembered – though there are surviving plaques for the former, and graffiti stencils left by the young far right for the latter). Many were persecuted after 1945, and a small group of the Home Army formed Independence and Freedom, a partisan organization which fought on in the forests for some years. The Home Army’s most famous action, the Warsaw Rising of August 1944, is central to post-1989 Poland’s story of itself. Though it was of course directed against the Nazis, most sources agree it was also designed to secure the city so that the Red Army would be met by ‘facts on the ground’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the Red Army, bar its Polish units under General Berling, was ordered not to assist, and they watched the city burn from the other side of the Vistula.

Guidebooks like to mention how ‘ugly’ Warsaw’s many war memorials are, as if the correct response to the suffering in this city would have been to erect something pretty. What is maybe more interesting is the way they try to create entire cityscapes of memorialization, in the Soviet manner – memorials as three-dimensional pieces of city, rather than as pieces of art you can casually walk past. And like Soviet monuments, this can make them rather silly – the first official memorial to the Warsaw Rising, built in 1988 mere months before the end of the system, has a combination of abstraction close to that cave-underpass that connects the Lavra to the war museum in Kiev – hulking concrete splinters through which bronze soldiers storm out. In a striking act of blasphemy against the national myth, the sculpture is known locally as ‘Running for a bus’. All are huge, but some are less ideological than others – the Sappers’ Monument, built in the 1970s, doesn’t state whether the Sappers were in the Home Army or the communist People’s Army, but it forms an ensemble with a riverside embankment. The combination of abstract plinth and hulking figures returns, as do some densely packed, tortured friezes, bulging out with angst and horror. The jagged plinths (representing in stone the risk of exploded mines) and the statue of a singular Sapper are one side of a complex which pulls an underpass leading to the river into itself – when you get to the other end, the memorial continues, more of the low-relief figures of resistance fighters, providing a dead end in front of the Vistula.

In the Warsaw Rising’s dedicated museum, you get little sense that the Nazis might have been motivated by ideology in their extreme suppression of the Poles – specifically, racial ideology, with Poles regarded as ‘subhuman’. It just ‘happened’ because they were bad people who wanted to suppress Polish independence. The museum spreads across an old factory that was badly damaged during the rising. A steel-framed watchtower has been erected, emblazoned with the ubiquitous symbol for ‘Poland Fights’, which you still find graffitied on every street corner, as if the war were still going on. And indeed, according to the museum guides, it is – Agata overhears one telling a group of schoolchildren: ‘You think the war finished in 1945? No!’

A gathering at the Sappers’ Monument, Warsaw, on a 1985 postcard

The walls around the museum are decorated by Polish street artists, with murals on Solidarity, on the women of the Home Army, and some horror-cartoon images of fighting Poles. Nazis and Nazism are not depicted much here, either. When you go inside, though, the architecture of the museum is immediately redolent of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, with dim, mood-setting lighting, dramatic montaged dioramas rather than mere objects under glass, and lots of machinery on display, with an aeroplane suspended across the old machine hall. All exhibits, as in Riga but unlike in Kiev, are captioned in English. There is a lot about the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, and one tiny panel on the Ghetto rising of 1943. But it also has much more of the immersive museum spaces that a visitor to London’s Imperial War Museum might recognize – a walk-in office of the underground, a bunker you can hide in. Its day-by-day charting of the rising and its accounts from participants is undeniably moving, and their courage and heroism are, again, indisputable, especially against such overwhelming odds. The photographs of these ordinary Poles taking over their city are emblazoned on the walls, and their joy, their obvious sense of liberation, is clear. But if the museum tells you how, it never asks why. Why did the Nazis treat Poles like subhumans? Who were they? What did they want? It’s almost as if to think about fascism would be to think critically about nationalism … And at the end, of course, we have Ronald Reagan commemorating the insurgents, John Paul II quoted reminding us that ‘there is no way to understand this Nation without Christ’, and rooms on the subsequent Soviet liberation/occupation. And here, in this room lit by a giant neon hammer-and-sickle, are panel profiles of Soviet collaborators. The implication is that the horrors did not really end until 1989.⁴⁵ But we hear once again that song which was blasted out on the way into the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, the enormous roar of ‘The Sacred War’, now repositioned to sing of occupation, not liberation. It may be a ‘subverting’ of the original use, but the results here are every bit as black and white and didactic as the spaces of Soviet memory.

So is there a way of remembering that is not somehow against a continuation of or a reaction to the jingoistic architecture of Stalinism? We came across two in particular which tried to do something different. One of them departs from the national, state-subsidized politics of memory for a remarkable transformation of a memorial space into property development – the ‘Corvin Quarter’, in Budapest. A large Baroque circus just behind Budapest’s radial Haussmannian boulevard is, at first, a continuous monument to 1956. The big tenement blocks curve around a small cinema, which is covered with plaques for the revolution that had one of its main centres exactly here. Insurgents are commemorated with dozens of plaques, with biographies which aren’t afraid to make clear how many of them and their leaders were communists; in fact, the only communists who have monuments to them surviving in the city are of course Imre Nagy, Pál Maléter, Sándor Kopácsi, and others who saw no contradiction between socialism and an insurrection against Stalinism. The dozens of memorials are in a wholly different aesthetic from Stalinist edifices, too, with cursive typography, the inclusion of photos and little portraits, and lots of crosses. A map shows you the Quarter and the battles fought there. Walk around it and you’ll find that these are the only historical buildings left, as you suddenly find yourself in a new, shiny, Modernist shopping arcade, and then on a promenade lined by pristine luxury apartment blocks, exactly the same in style as any in Western Europe, with Trespa and brick cladding, little balconies and the like. The way it is all planned, from the memorial circus leading to the new development, appears to suggest that the culmination of the Hungarian revolution against Stalinism and Russian colonialism was luxury living solutions for the new European bourgeoisie. There are few places where the spatial link between nationalism and capitalism is quite so obvious, but here the Stalinist legacy has been truly left behind.

The other is unusual for its degree of contestation, its incompleteness, its inability and unwillingness to speak with one voice about the past – the series of memorial spaces dedicated to the Solidarity movement, in its birthplace, the Gdańsk shipyards. The first monument here was designed in 1980, and erected soon after – a triple cross dedicated to the shipyard workers who fell here in the wildcat strikes of 1970, when the army were sent in to suppress them with force. The crosses, designed by Bogdan Pietruszka, are of twisted and tapered steel, as raw and metallic as the ships; they are obviously religious in their symbolism, but on the lower parts of each cross, at eye level, are relief sculptures, depicting the workers and their struggle. Even after Solidarity, too, was violently suppressed at the end of 1981, the monument was retained, and after 1989 it was accompanied by various other memorial spaces, which seem only to have expanded as the shipyards have closed. An auto-rusting International Solidarity Centre, devoted to the histories of the trade union movement and anti-communism (not always the same thing, alas) was nearly under construction, described by Pyzik in Poor but Sexy as a place where you can ‘see in a nutshell the results of the capitalist transition’, a queasy historical joke, whose rusting and weathering do not only symbolize ‘memory’ but also inadvertently the disappearance of the shipyards themselves and the jobs that came with them. When we went there, a small fragment of the yard still existed, devoted now only to breaking rather than building ships; their red-brick sheds and immense pipelines and rotting infrastructure, constructed mostly when this was still Danzig, are abutted by wasteland. It’s a goldmine for lovers of industrial design, all hard Hansa brick, twisted steel, skyscraping cranes and spindly gantries, blown by dust and crisscrossed by mud. The old entrance is still the way in, and you can just pass there from the street, past a kiosk selling Solidarity souvenirs.

The Gdańsk strikes in both 1970 and 1980 were initially caused by price rises for food, intended to make the system ‘rational’, like capitalism is, with prices decided by the market, not by what a worker can or can’t afford. The Gdańsk workers’ demands are emblazoned on the entrance to the shipyard, in full – in fact, what you see is the original text, scrawled in red and black onto a board. Aside from demanding amnesties for political prisoners and a free press, they include demands for fixed prices, for equal access to health care, and for the abolition of the special shops where those with access to foreign currency could buy things unavailable elsewhere. Demands for the restoration of the free market, let alone for ‘shock therapy’, are conspicuous by their absence. In fact, apart from the clause demanding freedom of worship, their programme would have been described anywhere in the world but Poland in 1980 as ‘socialist’. Peter Gowan wrote of this apparent paradox at the time, ‘Nationalised industry has entailed a number of social and economic corollaries: full employment and economic security; very low and largely stable prices for essential items such as food, housing, transport, etc.; rising living standards; a large and generally growing degree of social egalitarianism (in comparison with capitalist states); a lower level of work intensity; and, for a minority of the manual working class, prospects of social privileges and upward mobility considerably greater than under capitalism. Almost all of these phenomena are indeed registered in western bourgeois literature on the states of Eastern Europe, but they are mentioned overwhelmingly in the context of the supposed economic evils of these systems. Thus we hear an unending stream of scorn for the arbitrary prices, the slack work rhythm, the supposed absurdities of full employment in terms of rational use of labour resources, and so on … What is less often registered is that these supposedly irrational social features of the East European states are perceived by their own working populations as important social gains and rights … all the historical evidence of these states demonstrates that any attempt to tamper with these rights is liable to produce a political crisis.’ Seen in this way, it almost seems as if the strikes were not designed to bring down communism, but to enforce communism on some very reluctant communists. The reaction to this in December 1981 stopped this as a possibility for good.⁴⁶

A 1981 postcard of the Shipyard Memorial, Gdańsk

Solidarity never spoke with one voice, including within it Catholics, Party members, dissidents, political prisoners, nationalists and even a few Marxists; its programme, by late 1981, was essentially syndicalist, calling for a ‘self-managing republic’. Although nothing here suggests that syndicalism is remembered, there is a clash of memorials: the demands over the entrance, where in plain sight you can see exactly what it was they wanted, and how they didn’t get it, either in 1981 or in 1989; the crosses, which make clear their devout Catholicism and their adherence to a Soviet iconography of labour; a concrete wall, decorated with memorial plaques from all over Poland, a collection of messages of thanks to the Gdańsk workers for their role in liberating the country – one, depressingly, features a bust of Marshal Piłsudski, and one wonders how exactly they think this military dictator would have reacted to a mass strike on the Baltic coast. And, inside, there are remnants of more recent art projects, courtesy of the small Wyspa (‘Island’) gallery in one of the nineteenth-century warehouses. These include a miniature version, created by the artist Grzegorz Klaman, of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, that Futurist dream devoted to international workers’ solidarity, which has built inside it, instead of the hub of the world workers’ revolution, a Corten steel bunker, a suggestive image of what that dream of international revolution eventually became, here in this international seaport. It all amounts to a confused, emotional but powerful statement of just how little of this struggle is clear and obvious, a contradictory rejoinder to all those univocal statements of national heroism, whether Soviet or post-Soviet. Still, if developers have their way, it’ll one day be an unusually artistic entrance to a giant hypermarket.

Tatlin’s tower, Gdańsk shipyards

IGNORANCE OF HIS MEMORY IS A CRIME

I will finish this chapter with two ‘house museums’, both dedicated to Georgian-born members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, both of whom wrote some poetry. The first of these stands in between Dzhugashvili Street and Stalin Prospekt, at the centre of the small but historic Georgian town of Gori. Even a visitor unfamiliar with the most basic rules of town planning will have worked out that the entire town has been planned around this house museum. Stalin Avenue is a magistrale, its wide expanse lined with Tverskaya-style monumental apartment buildings (dressed with balconies and pinnacles in line with the Ottoman–Persian ‘national form’ in this part of the Union) on a scale which might seem excessive for a town of around 50,000 inhabitants, with a glass-domed neoclassical city hall larger than those of many cities ten times its size. At the end of the magistrale is Stalin Park, a pretty, symmetrical green space with a channelled stream in the middle, and at the end of that is the J. V. Stalin Memorial Museum.

Before we proceed to this place, some explaining needs to be done so you know why it manages to exist at all. A month after Khrushchev’s (soon not-so-)secret speech of February 1956, rumours that Stalin had been publicly denounced reached Tbilisi. A mass wreath-laying at the city’s Stalin statue escalated into what were by Soviet standards huge street protests of tens of thousands, carrying pictures of Stalin, demanding Khrushchev and his allies Mikoyan and Bulganin resign and that the Stalin loyalist Vyacheslav Molotov take over. The demonstrations spread to all Georgian cities and were, eventually, violently suppressed, with at least a hundred people killed when the Red Army shot at demonstrators in Tbilisi. Stalin, mocked by Khrushchev as the self-proclaimed ‘father of the Georgians’, was roundly defended by his co-nationals as a great national hero; but however much Georgian nationalists (such as the curators of Tbilisi’s historically nonsensical Museum of the Soviet Occupation) might claim that this was an incipient movement for Georgian independence, its symbol and figurehead was the late Josef Stalin. This is paradoxical, to say the least, given that the main reason why Lenin requested in his ‘testament’ the removal of Stalin from his post was his brutal treatment of the Georgian Bolshevik leadership. Georgia was independent under Menshevik rule (with more than a little British assistance) from 1918 to 1921, and only Sovietized at gunpoint by the Red Army, at the insistence of Georgian Bolsheviks in Russia like Stalin and Ordzhonikidze. The newly installed local Georgian Bolshevik leadership, however, tolerated the Mensheviks and demanded federal rather than union affiliation to the USSR, as it was created in 1922. Stalin’s crushing of the local communists helped define the Soviet Union as a (much more equal-opportunties) rebranding of the Russian Empire rather than the equal federation it could have been. Even this was a compromise with Lenin – Stalin had preferred to annex Georgia straight to Russia.⁴⁷

For all his obvious contempt for local sensitivities, Stalin was still a Georgian, who spoke Russian with an accent, and allowed Georgia much the same freedom in matters of ‘national form’ as any other republic of the Union, and it suffered no more and no less from the Great Purge. For all that, the effects of Stalin’s rule on his home town were more dramatic than most. The first part of the J. V. Stalin Memorial Museum accessible from Stalin Prospekt is a marble cube, in the cold, honey-coloured local stone, with white marble columns, top-lit with a square of yellowing stained glass. This encloses a tiny little house, formed out of the same poor-quality bricks and cement as the flat expansions of contemporary Tbilisi, with a flimsy wooden balustrade to the street. This, preserved since 1936, is the house where Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, later Koba, later still Stalin, was born, to a cobbler and former serf in 1878, and where he spent his childhood. It is this tiny house (one of what would have been several like it nearby) which the entire town, having been demolished, has been rebuilt around – the living proof of how far Joe Stalin, working-class hero, had come from this shabby little house shared with his parents’ landlord. There are few better indictments of Stalin’s notion of what ‘socialism’ entailed than that. But if the house’s preservation dates from his lifetime, the building behind it is posthumous – a massive museum to his memory, finished in 1957 just at the time when monuments to Stalin elsewhere started to be dismantled, as were the worst aspects of his system: the Gulag, the deportations, the purges, the quasi-medieval inquisitions, the absurd strictures on architecture, art and literature, albeit while leaving the political-economic system he created substantially intact. The museum building is a completion of the magistrale, a neo-Venetian palace with an airy colonnade, an ornamental attic and a heraldic tower at its corner. There is a certain sick irony in the fact that the world’s two surviving museums to Stalin (there is another, smaller, in Batumi, also in Georgia) were built and preserved as a concession to a popular protest movement in a republic that has had and still has an often hostile relationship to Russia, and not as the legitimation of a Brezhnev or a Putin.

Encased in marble, the family home of J. V. Stalin, Gori

It is still a popular concession. Gori’s oversized city hall boasted an oversized Stalin statue until 2010, removed by central government and apparently soon to be rebuilt at the instigation of the city council; attempts to close the museum are regularly blocked by the plucky locals. A gruff statue of the man stands in a niche in the railway station, another lurks in Stalin Park, another still is in the local war museum, and then there’s the one at the top of the stairs in the anteroom of the main Memorial Museum – more Stalins, in fact, than you’ll find at any of the post-Soviet statue graveyards, here in unironic situ. In them you can see that Stalin statues gestured less than Lenins: they present a relatively humble-looking chap with moustache, usually standing stiffly rather than pointing forwards. Aside from its impressive medieval castle, since Gori’s industry collapsed along with the rest of the Georgian economy in the 1990s, the Stalin Museum is the only thing that would make anyone other than (in 2008, during the South Ossetia war) the Russian army come here. Inside the museum, we are encouraged to pay extra for an English-language guide – a well-made-up woman of around fifty who takes us up through the thicket of slender marble columns in the anteroom, up the red-carpeted stairs, to the museum itself. Gesturing with a thin metal pointer, her assessment of Stalin’s life is full of numbers, facts and statistics – the year he was born, the amount of time he spent in Siberian exile, the amount of times he escaped, the awards he received, the amount of texts he wrote, the divisions he commanded, humanized only when she gets to a panel on Stalin’s unfortunate family (some of whom, it transpires, were and are visitors to and supporters of the museum). These are not the numbers, facts and statistics you usually hear in conjunction with Stalin’s life and work. The space itself is perhaps not quite as terrifying as it might have been a few years before its 1957 opening, when Stalin was celebrated as a demi-god, but it is still, as you would expect, a shock. The first room, lit from above by gold-framed top-lighting, from the side by decorated stained-glass windows, and lined below with a patterned parquet floor, depicts his early life, revealing along with his rugged good looks and his youthful radical poetry (on sale in English translation downstairs) a remarkable collection of paintings of Stalin the boy. In one he is reading, idea-struck, from a book of poetry to his young friends, with Gori Castle in the background. After that, a room on his career as General Secretary, another on his time as Generalissimo, all full of artworks and curios (lacquerwork portraits, Stalin’s fur coat, his chairs, his paperweights, etc., etc.), and then a circular, darkened room containing at its centre his death mask. ‘There are many casts of this death mask,’ our guide tells us. ‘Each one is ten per cent smaller than the previous one.’ This narrative of Stalin’s life is, as you would expect in 1957 if you were an aggrieved young Georgian Stalinist, devoid of any mention of the mass incarceration, deportation and terrifyingly random, aimless murder of, among others, millions of entirely innocent Poles, Latvians, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ukranian peasants, Koreans, Volga Germans, Kazakhs, Russians, Georgians and, most of all, communists, who were jailed and killed at a rate surpassed perhaps only by Hitler. The narrative instead gives way to a series of wood-panelled, barrel-vaulted rooms, lit by Rococo chandeliers, a space shaped like a mini-Moscow Metro station, lined with glass cases containing gifts for Stalin, from Polish metalworkers, Chinese, Italian and Finnish communists, and a grain of rice upon which an Indian communist has written a poem of praise to Stalin, helpfully magnified.

Gifts for Comrade Stalin, Gori

From here, the guide can take you inside Stalin’s extremely cramped childhood home, or through his personal bulletproof railway carriage. However, there is one recently opened room at the end of the main museum where you can see a mock-up of an NKVD interrogation room, with, we’re told, authentic trenchcoats, a panel on murdered Soviet leaders (Zinoviev, victim of Stalin, on the same panel as Beria, victim of Khrushchev) and, meaninglessly, a panel on Russia’s shelling and brief occupation of Gori in 2008, for which, for once, Stalin can’t be wholly blamed. The museum of the ‘great leader of the world’s proletariat’ stays resolutely local. Round the back of the station are streets of small houses that, aside from some Georgian-style balcony surgery, satellite dishes, cars and Orthodox memorial plaques to sons killed in South Ossetia, could be fundamentally unchanged from when young Dzhugashvili’s house was round here. Seventy or so years of ‘socialism’ followed by twenty of capitalism haven’t changed things here much, out of sight of that magistrale on the other side of the museum, where, as Engels wrote, ‘the most scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the great accompaniment of lavish self-glorification … but – they re-appear once again somewhere else, and often in the immediate neighbourhood.’⁴⁸ If this is what all that suffering was for, then why not reject it all?

The other house museum is the last of the memorial spaces to be built in the Soviet Union while it still existed. This is something called the State Mayakovsky Museum, dedicated to the ‘Com-Futurist’ poet, playwright, actor and draughtsman, born near Kutaisi in 1893, who would become the hero both of communist youth in the 1920s and of the young of the ‘Thaw’ in the 1950s and 1960s. It was built largely in 1990 and opened to the public then, although the last exhibit dates from 1993. It is built into the house where Vladimir Mayakovsky lived from the early 1920s until his 1930 suicide. House museums are an omnipresent genre in Russia and Ukraine, where a collection of someone’s knick-knacks – always a desk, with their books on it – is either preserved or, more often, reconstructed. They’re often a bit dull. You can tell the Mayakovsky house museum is going to be different when you see a red-painted steel polygon rammed into the side of the neoclassical tenement where he lived, avant-garde architecture of a far more pulp, pop, cheap sort than the Le Corbusian Modernism that actually got built in Mayakovsky’s day. Enter, and you find what must be expensive artefacts – dozens of gorgeous books designed by Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, photographs of the man and fragments from his poems, architectural drawings from the Vesnin brothers, tens of posters, paintings, sketches, police mugshots, architectural fragments, smashed-up temples. They are placed in a vague, fragmented chronology, but as in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, the priceless artefacts are not kept under glass but pulled into room-size dioramas connected by steel and wood frames and, here, wire mesh, making every exhibit an entirely original sculpture, a ludic pile-up, everything full of joy, imagination and experiment – far less a museumification of the old leftist avant-garde than any of the scrupulously curated exhibitions on them in the West.

Flying out of history at the State Mayakovsky Museum, Moscow

As you go through these rooms, the exhibits seem not so much to have been constructed but to have been swept up by the wind and thrown together, clinging on to each other in a maelstrom which has been abruptly paused, as in a cartoon, so you can walk through it. It’s amazing it all manages to stand up. At one point, little portraits of Mayakovsky and his colleagues on the magazine LEF are suspended in a wooden frame in the shape of a biplane, suspended from the ceiling. Look closely and there is actually a narrative here about Mayakovsky himself – childhood in Georgia, early membership of the Bolshevik Party as a teenager, imprisonment, dandyism, Futurism, Constructivism, his loves, his commemorations of Lenin, his travels through America and Europe, and his inspiration of left-wing artists and writers abroad. But the specifics feel less important than this explosion of creativity, this incredible release, with which the architects of perestroika have reconstructed the aesthetic experience of the revolution and its immediate aftermath. It’s doubtful whether it’s an even remotely accurate depiction of the actual experience, the grain of everyday life, in the 1920s; the grey room upstairs that served as Mayakovsky’s study certainly suggests not. But what it does is convey an idea. It is the only revolutionary memorial of all of these we came across which argues that revolution might be a rather exciting thing, one that would transform the world, and transform space, for the better. Worth doing. Why not try it. But in the last room one of the broken images is a photograph taken in 1993, of the Russian parliament on fire.