Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 29 – Because of
new construction, there are now more than 900 monuments in the city of Moscow,
a trend that other places in the Russian Federation are following as well, Novaya gazeta reports; but because there
is no consensus on who should get a memorial and who should not, this monument “boom”
is sparking controversy.
Journalists Alisa Kustikova and
Darya Kobylkina note that “almost 50” new monuments appeared in the last year up
from 10 in preceding years; and that number is likely to jump because activists
have found a way around getting the required approval from the city’s monument’s
commission: they call the plaques or statues not monuments but “exhibits” (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/01/29/75306-bolshe-chem-pamyatnik).
That end-run was
pioneered by the Russian Military-History Society in the case of a three-meter
bronze statue of Ivan the Terrible, but its tactic has been picked up by many
others, a major reason that the government has lost control of the process not
only in Moscow but in other places as well.
More than a third – “about 40
percent” – of all monuments in Moscow are now about World War II. Lenin still
is memorialized in 39, and Aleksandr Pushkin in nine. Most of the monuments are
concentrated in Moscow’s central district – “about 250” of the 900 – “at a
minimum twice more than in any other part of the city.”
And the gender imbalance in statuary,
the journalists say, is striking: “only one in ten of the monuments in the capital
is devoted to a woman.”
The last year featured scandals abut
whether to have a monument to gun inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov, one for the
victims of political repression, and one for Boris Nemtsov. In the last case,
the population keeps putting up a memorial and the authorities keep taking it
down either directly or via allies in the population.
But there were numerous other
conflicts, including whether to put up a statue to former Uzbekistan President
Islam Karimov, to move the statue of Lenin from Kaluga Square to somewhere less
prominent, and whether there should ever be any memorial for Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn.
The year ended with an appeal by the
KPRF to Vladimir Putin to restore the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky to the Lubyanka
Square, but the journalists suggest that there is little likelihood that will
happen, at least anytime soon. Indeed, many Muscovites say they’d like a moratorium
on all new statuary altogether.
Because of the use of the category “exhibit,”
the two continue, there has been a significant “liberalization” about the range
of what can and will be put up. Only if there is a controversy do the
authorities get involved, although it is likely that they spark a controversy
when they want to.
One major initiative of memorialization
from below is the “Last Address” movement where plaques are put on the last
known address of victims of Soviet-era repressions. There are now 630 such
plaques around the country, 200 of which appeared in the last year alone. All
are paid for by private contributions.
Specialists on monuments point to
several other trends: in many places, people are putting up memorials to local people
rather than all-Russian figures, although “the Soviet tradition” of
distributing statuary according to a single model continues in the case of
Nicholas II. There are now 30 identical statues of the last tsar in various
places.
There are also efforts to use
statuary to promote national reconciliation. In Ulyanovsk, for example, there
is a plaque honoring both Vladimir Lenin and Aleksandr Kerensky at the school
where they both studied. And there is an
especially sizeable memorial boom in occupied Crimea” where for example the
authorities wanted a statue of Aleksandr III while the people wanted one of
Franklin Roosevelt.
But perhaps the most intriguing
development in 2017 was the appearance of memorials to recent deaths both in
combat and otherwise. The authorities don’t seem to be against that in most
cases, and consequently there are likely to be more such monuments in the
future.
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