I saw my first Soviet war memorial in Vienna when I was a grad student. I’d wandered onto Schwarzenbergplatz and, lo and behold, there it was: in front of a semi-circular white marble colonnade was a tall column topped by the figure of a Red Army soldier. He was wearing a gold helmet and had a submachine gun slung across his chest. His right hand held a staff with a furled Soviet flag; the other, a gold Soviet coat of arms. The Soviets unveiled this memorial honoring the Red Army dead from the Vienna offensive of April 1945 the following August. The timing was not coincidental: it occurred just as the other three Allied powers were due to take up their zones of occupation in the Austrian capital. During the decade of Four-Power occupation, the memorial also included a Soviet T-34 tank. Tanks, of course, are another variation of Red Army memorials that could long be found throughout Soviet-occupied eastern Europe. In any case, I forgot about the memorial, because, well, dissertation research. By the time I returned to Vienna in 1995, I was interested in political monuments in public spaces, so I photographed it. For the first of many times.
There’s a similar Red Army monument in Berlin’s Tiergarten. Also unveiled in 1945, it commemorates the 80,000 soldiers who died–some 2,000 are buried on the site–during of the Battle of Berlin in April and early May of that year. The colonnade is constructed of stone from the Reich Chancellery, which was destroyed during the war. The inscription on the pedestal of the twenty-six-foot-tall bronze statue reads “Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in battle with the German fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of the Soviet Union.”
I’ve also photographed a third Red Army soldier on a plinth, this one, kneeling. He’s in Brno, the Czech Republic. I came upon him when I was sightseeing, as one does, in the cemetery. Brno’s Central Cemetery is really interesting. In addition to the graves of Brno residents, there is a small section with graves of Nazi war dead. Then there is the large burial ground of the Soviet Army that dates from 1946. The Red Army soldier his submachine gun in hand, kneeling high on a column dominates the site. The burial ground includes a columbarium and other military-burial elements, some of which were added during its reconstruction in 1979-1980. The bodies of 3,364 rank-and-file, some of whom died elsewhere in the fighting across southern Moravia, share a common grave. Officers were cremated, and placed in their own urns, while senior officers got their own, individual graves.
Although the fate of Emperor Joseph II monuments in interwar Czechoslovakia was long my main concern, I still took pictures of all kinds of statues and memorials of historic interest in the Czech Republic, including those of Red Army soldiers. By the mid-1990s, many of these soldier-monuments had had their inscriptions removed. Some had been moved from their original pedestals altogether. These are among the ways Czech authorities deal with inconvenient political/politicized figures in public spaces. Many of these statues can be found in the border regions. What struck me about them was how cheerful, even elated, these men in bronze appear to be, as if they are pleased with themselves to have completed a job well.
The Soviet soldier on the far left stands in a central square of Znojmo in southern Moravia. He’s visible from the road between Prague and Vienna. If you stop to take pictures, make absolutely certain you break no traffic rules. The local police are on the lookout for Prague license plates so they can ticket those uppity city folks. At least they were last time I stopped in a Prague-plated car, which was in late 2011. The second soldier, the one who looks like he’s doing some kind of pilates stretch, is on a main road near Opava. The soldier with both arms up is in Western Bohemia. The imposing soldier on the far right stands in the center of Brno. The foundation stone for this monument was laid in 1946. His raised arm supposedly means stop firing. His original inscription was removed and has since been replaced more than once. Beginning in 1989, vandals have given him the paint treatment.
Of course, Red Army memorials aren’t limited to Vienna and the Czech Republic. Rather they can be found all over the former Warsaw Pact countries insofar as they haven’t been removed. The monuments don’t necessarily look alike, but many share similarities one might expect of victorious war memorials, above all an unnamed rank-and-file Red Army soldier, admittedly sometimes modeled on a well-known local, victorious over the Nazi enemy. These monuments also often mark the graves of dead Soviet soldiers.
The Red Army memorial in Cracow, Poland, still stood in Planty Park near the Barbican when I photographed it in 1995. Although there had been plans to move it and the bodies of Soviet soldiers over which it stood to the local military cemetery as early as 1990, the monument was moved only in 1997.
The Red Army soldier monument in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia in the Baltic, had been a source of controversy between ethnic Estonians and members of the Russian minority since Estonian independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. When I photographed the monument with its 6’-5” bronze soldier in July 2006, it already had a police guard and was surrounded by yellow tape, both of which I avoided in my picture. Neither the Russian residents of Estonia nor the Russians themselves responded well to plans to move it. Both the memorial and the war dead over whom the soldier stood guard were removed to Tallinn’s military cemetery in 2007.
The large Soviet war memorial in Chernivtsi (formerly Chernowitz), the capital of Bukovina, in Ukraine, stands on Sobor (Cathedral) Square in the city center. It is interesting, because it honors the city’s liberation from Axis (Romanian) troops, although Chernivtsi, the capital of provincial Bukovina during the Habsburg Monarchy, had been part of Romania between the world wars. The memorial incorporates a tall stone column, but rather than standing atop it, the bronze soldier, clutching a gun across his chest in one hand and holding a furled flag in the other, stands, like the soldier in Cracow, at the column’s base. On his pedestal are inscribed the dates of the Soviets’ Second World War, “1941-1945.”
My favorite Red Army memorial is also in Bukovina. This soldier in Nedoboistvi is not standing at attention or even at rest. In fact, he isn’t standing at all. Full of demonic energy, he appears to be racing toward some unknown goal, one fist punching forward, submachine gun clutched in his other hand. I mentioned this monument to a Ukrainian friend who told me the soldier was thinking, “Go West.” You know, like the Pet Shop Boys’ song.
Of Monuments and Memory 