East European Politics and
Societies and Cultures
Volume 36 Number 4
November 2022  1151­–1176
© 2021 Sage Publications
https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254211043856
journals.sagepub.com/home/eep
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
From the Bronze Soldier
to the “Bloody Marshal”:
Monument Wars and Russia’s Aesthetic
Vulnerability in Estonia and the Czech Republic
Aliaksei Kazharski
Comenius University in Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Andrey Makarychev
University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
The article analyzes historical monuments as instruments of Russia’s attempts to impose
its aesthetic hegemony in the post-Communist world. Drawing on case studies from the
Czech Republic and Estonia, it argues that this hegemony is precarious and vulnerable
due to inability to deal with the inherent ambiguity and complexity of historical events
and figures. The Russian approach regards historical truth in absolute terms and is
underpinned by a zero-sum game understanding of historical narratives. It does not
tolerate a multiplicity of perspectives on history and has no appreciation for postmodernist
deconstruction of historical symbols. This conflicts with a more diverse, reflexive
and inclusive politics of memory as an intrinsic element of cityscapes of Prague and
Tallinn where some of the controversial monuments connected with the Soviet occupation
have been removed. Russia’s reaction to these changes reveals an inherently vulnerable
nature of its aesthetic hegemony which is deeply dependent on recognition of the
absolute nature of its historical truth that the monuments are supposed to embody.
Keywords:  Czech Republic; Estonia; memory politics; aesthetics; historical monuments;
Russian foreign policy
Introduction
The extant academic scholarship is replete with research on memory politics
through the prism of national identities and myth making,1 practices of historical
reconciliation,2 and the role of the media in symbolization of painful remembrances
of violence and injustice. In this article, we propose a different approach
to studying memory politics as an inherent element of the aesthetic organization
of urban spaces where monuments to Soviet soldiers have been located, which
1043856EEPXXX10.1177/08883254211043856East European Politics & Societies and CulturesKazharski and Makarychev / Short Title
research-article2021
1152  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
contributes to the emerging discussions about interconnections of memory studies,
foreign policy analysis and urban studies.
The article is a comparative study of two incidents related to monuments to
Soviet soldiers—the relocation of the Bronze Soldier statue from Tallinn downtown
to a military cemetery in 2007, and the removal of the monument to the Soviet military
commander Ivan Konev in Prague in 2020. With all the apparent similarities,
the structures of the two cases are different: the removal of the Bronze Soldier in
Tallinn provoked a violent confrontation between the police and the activists of the
Russain speaking community, and became a factor of political polarization within
Estonia. The Prague controversy, apart from the Konev statue, included also the
renaming of the square in front of the Russian Embassy after the murdered antiPutin
opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, as well as commemoration of the antiSoviet
Russian Liberation Army (ROA) fighters who collaborated with the Nazi
Germany during WWII. However, the Estonian and Czech cases are comparable to
each other as two different experiences of reorganizing urban aesthetics, followed
by Russia’s involvement in memory debates. The juxtaposition of the two cases is
at the core of the main research questions we tackle in this article: what do aesthetic
and performative components of the monuments’ removals tell us about the exteriorization
of Russian memory politics? And what do aesthetic and performative
approaches uncover in situations of direct or indirect collisions between the Russian
military aesthetics and practices of remembrance and memorialization in the Baltic
states and Central Europe?
The discussion on the two cases might be extended to other events, such as the
so-called Leninopad (“the Leninfall”), the toppling of Communist statues in
Ukraine following the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. These decommunization practices
were in fact identity statements and expressions of Ukraine’s binarized geopolitical
choice, i.e. pro-Russian vs. pro-European.3 In other words, through the
shared Soviet legacy, the continued presence of Communist statues on Ukrainian
soil could be seen as resignified to mean belonging to Russia’s imperial space, its
perceived “sphere of exclusive interest.” Productive comparisons are certainly
possible here; however, there are also notable differences between Ukraine and our
case studies. First, Ukraine as of 2013 was in a situation of a sharp geopolitical
choice, and starting from 2014 in a de facto state of war with Russia. Neither of the
two can be observed in Prague or Tallinn who had, by the respective time periods,
been safely integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community (and, as far as the Czech
Republic is concerned, even had some rather Kremlin-friendly leaders in power).
This is one thing that clearly sets the Prague and Tallinn cases apart from Ukraine’s
Leninopad and makes them unique instances of intervention into domestic urban
landscapes during times of peace.
The second (and related) important difference has to do with the ideological
substance of the monuments. Though in the Ukrainian context Lenin arguably
came to represent the shared Soviet past and the present geopolitical trajectory
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1153
(which easily explains Russia’s sensitivity), per se Lenin is not a particularly powerful
symbol in Putin’s Russia. It is not the memory of the Bolshevik revolution but
the Brezhnevite cult of the Great Patriotic War that was recycled in post-Soviet
Russia to become one of the main ideological pillars of regime legitimacy.4 Both
the Tallinn and the Prague monuments bear much greater ideological significance
than any hypothetical Lenin statue because they are elements of this cult—and this
is also the reason why we choose to analyze them in a dyad.
Methodologically, we construct our comparative study on the premises of multimodal
analysis, an approach that engages equally with both textual and visual signs,
and that semiotically interprets them as means of communication and as political
representations. Being inspired by research in discourses and narratives, multimodal
analysis is instrumental in identifying “visual truth claims” and finding out how the
urban milieu can align citizens “with some truths and distance them from others.”5
This allows us to keep a balance between attention to the aesthetic components of the
displaced monuments and the intense public debates around these incidents. The
structure of cases reflects our overall methodological approach: each event-based
section starts with a short review of the extant academic literature, and then proceeds
to analysis of visualized evidences and testimonies of aesthetic practices we are
investigating. Of particular interest is counter-hegemonic aesthetics of cultural products
and public activities that accompanied the monuments’ removals. Apart from
visuals (films, photo expositions, performers’ materials) we included in our empirical
base direct narratives of participants of the two events, as well as some professional
opinions concerning the impact of these events on urban cultural landscapes.
Visualized objects of memory as parts of urban architecture encode important political
messages and unveil relations of hegemony and power. In the next section, we
develop this argument from a conceptual perspective, followed by the factually
grounded theoretical analysis of the two cases and the ensuing discussion.
Urban Politics and Instrumentalized Memory
We approach the field of memory politics as a battleground of different aesthetic
regimes that clash with each other and produce political conflicts. Our understanding
of the concept of aesthetic regime is influenced by three interconnected clusters of
political theorizing. One is grounded in Jacques Rancière’s idea of the “distribution
of the sensible,” which shapes “the boundaries of what is visible and invisible, thinkable
and unthinkable, seemingly rational and irrational.”6 By analogy with “language
games,” the “distribution of the sensible” might be viewed as a realm of
“image games” of marking, appropriating and signifying spaces and their material
symbols, and integrating them into the hegemonic regimes of visibility.
Another source of theoretical inspiration was Ronald Bleiker’s interpretation of the
“aesthetic turn” in international studies.7 For him central to aesthetic regime is the
1154  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
concept of representation which is always “an act of power . . . an inevitably political
issue [manifesting] a gap between what is observed and how this observation is represented
. . . The difference between represented and representation is the very location
of politics.” In other words, there is always a space between signifieds and
signifiers which functions as a major producer of political meanings and—again—
often “enables a creativity that disrupts given identities and proscribed codes.”8
In addition to these two major clusters, we find common ground with the idea of
performativity as introduced in the academic literature by Judith Butler. When it
comes to historical monuments, of particular salience is the applicability of the aesthetics—performativity
nexus to different forms of (re)signification of physical
objects: “material structures are sedimented through ritualised repetitions of conduct
by embodied agents.”9 Both performativity and the aesthetic turn recognize the existence
of an inevitable gap between a material object and its symbolic interpretation
as an existential condition for the functioning of memory politics. What the theory of
performativity adds to that is a strong emphasis on repetitions and reiterations
embedded in each socially meaningful action.10 In the meantime, “any refusal to
repeat an act that confirms a subordinate identity, necessarily has a political effect”
as well.11 Consequently, “alternative ascriptions can also disrupt repetition and help
question normalization, including the practices they are meant to signify,12 and this
is exactly how the pro-removal discourses and actions can be interpreted in the language
we have chosen for this study.
In this article, we relate the concept of aesthetic regime to the urban visual culture
as “a catalyst for dealing with identity, voice, trauma and political notions of selfdetermination
and civic rights,”13 which presupposes “a power to define politics”14
as a semantic struggle for hegemony through exposing and hiding some elements of
reality, and “giving voice to something”15 that is excluded or silenced. “Visual management”16
of urban spaces therefore requires certain “aesthetics as technologies of
governance”17 that are performatively dependent on the cultural phenomenon known
as gazing which “refers to the `discursive determinations’ of socially constructed
seeing or `scopic regimes.’18 Gazing “is always entangled . . . with sets of rules and
expectations associated with particular contexts and particular societies about who
has the right to look and who has the right to be seen.”19
The proposed approach enhances “our understanding of the range of sites, locations,
and directions where aesthetics and politics converged.”20 City architecture
might be seen as a space where relations of power are produced and “aesthetically
negotiated,”21 since it always privileges “certain kinds of activities and inhibit others,
supports the projects of one type of actor and deters the goals of others.”22
Arguably, “the collective subject that emerged from the construct of the loss always
lays claims for geo- or topographic fixation,”23 even if this subject is located
beyond national borders.
The combination of the above-mentioned sources of theory opens up a perspective
of speaking about a “fluid condition of state ontology which is forever framed
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1155
and reframed”24. Therefore, we treat performed and aesthetisized identities as lacking
foundational grounds,25 and appearing as results of “subversive, counter-hegemonic
resignifications.”26 It is within this framework that we propose the idea of
aesthetic vulnerability, a category stemming from the widely discussed concepts of
dislocated / decentered subjectivities that might be applicable to regimes of visibility.
For example, the Estonian aesthetic regime of memory politics exposed its vulnerability
in light of the debates over construction of the column commemorating
the War of Independence at the Freedom Square in the center of Tallinn in 2008 (see
below), as well as due to a controversial co-existence of two monuments commemorating
Estonian fighters for independence and Soviet soldiers next to each other in
the town of Viljandi. What makes Russia’s policies particularly vulnerable is their
transgressive nature: Russia acts from a position of external power endeavoring to
project is aesthetic standards over foreign urban milieus. In other words, Russian
aesthetic vulnerability stems from a constitutive gap embedded in Russian memory
politics that is designed and articulated as a part of the foreign policy toolkit, yet in
each specific case is projected into the cultural landscapes of cityscapes with their
urban sensitivities. An intervention of a foreign state into urban affairs creates an
aesthetic asymmetry and multiple discrepancies between the logic of foreign policy,
on the one hand, and local authorities and citizenry concerned about their urban
public spaces, on the other.
This framework helps to identify cleavages between Russian mainstream aesthetic
regime of memory politics, and the aesthetic regimes emerging in European
countries that have been either occupied by the Soviet Union or included into its
sphere of influence. When it comes to Russia, this regime is grounded in a sacral
attitude to the Soviet memorials as signs representing the military glory of Stalin’s
regime and serving the purpose of a symbolic reminder about the legacy of the Great
Patriotic War and of its reactualization in today’s political calculus. As for countries
like Estonia and Czech Republic, their aesthetic regimes include the ironic deconstruction
of “one truth” narratives and the ensuing pluralization of memory debate,
which is, in turn, perceived as politically offensive or inappropriate by the Russian
defenders of the conservative understanding of history. In the categories of Bernhard
and Kubik (2014), this cleavage corresponds to distinctions between “mnemonic
warriors” and “mnemonic pluralists.”
Naturally, we do not imply an essentialist interpretation, according to which
Russians would only be capable of sacralizing or producing Manichean representations,
while Estonians and Czechs would be, by definition, “ironic deconstructivists.”
There are many brilliant examples of postmodern irony in the past and
present Russian art and culture, while, in both the Czech Republic and Estonia,
essentialist discourses can be easily discovered. Estonia, for instance, has seen a
surge of nativist politics with the rise of the right-wing EKRE party. Unless stated
otherwise, by “Russian” in this article we mean the official perspective expressed
by the Russian state media, the Kremlin, and its political allies. Furthermore, this
1156  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
perspective has also been mainstream, and even hegemonic, as Putin’s regime
monopolized the country’s foreign policy and political institutions. At least since
the 2014, it has also been successful in mobilizing considerable popular support
through its nativist politics at home and abroad. In this sense, it is impossible not
to distinguish between the Czech and Estonian cases on the one hand, and the
Russian case on the other. In contrast to Russia, the Czech Republic and Estonia
have remained polyarchies, with decisions on memory politics sometimes belonging
to local the self-government, such as in the case of Konev’s statue that was
removed by a Prague municipality and not the national government.
The Russian authorities, as well as much of the Russian public, on the other hand,
are unwilling to appreciate the polyarchic nature of decision making in Central and
Eastern European democracies, typically blaming the whole nation for these decisions
as if it were a unitary political actor. Thus, on the structural level, this also
becomes a clash of top-down, authoritarian, and pluralist, polyarchic approaches.
These approaches are informed not by national cultures but by the nature of the existing
political regimes and the state of the domestic public debate on memory politics.
Hence, while we do not, in any way, suggest an essentialist reading or a “crude”
binarization of the Russian and the Czech or Estonian perspectives, we certainly take
into account these important political differences in our analysis.
Furthermore, the Estonian and Czech cases should be regarded not simply as two
separate incidents, but as parts of a broader trend of multiple revolts against monuments
that since recently became visible in countries as different as Ukraine, Poland,
the United Kingdom, United States, or Finland. With all duly understood diverse
contexts of monument removals or appeals to do so, we in the meantime assume that
these numerous struggles with statues have a common denominator—under a close
scrutiny they all challenge the very principle of immortalizing a certain “regime of
truth,” exposed to a public gaze in petrified embodiments of historical personalities
with a high degree of symbolization. In this sense, the multiple cases of anti-monument
pronouncements and actions can be approached as projections of a postmodernist
logic of de(con)struction27 from the ideational realm to the sphere of material
culture. These gestures are often conceptualized as emancipatory and anti-colonial/
anti-imperial in the plurality of concomitant interpretations, and ultimately conducive
to the liberation of urban spaces from antiquated historical fixtures that are
becoming less relevant and more contested with the ongoing societal transformations.
This is what unites Black Lives Matter supporters’ demands for the demolition
of statues celebrating “slavery and racism” (including ones to Christopher Columbus),
Finnish left activists’campaign against the monument to Mannerheim in Helsinki, or
dozens of cases of dethroning Lenin from pedestals all across Ukraine.
What unites all three theoretical pillars—the “distribution of the sensible,” the
aesthetic turn and performativity—is their understanding of aesthetic practices as not
only interpretative and creative, but also disruptive and dissensual, and thus leading
to a more diverse political milieu.28 The aesthetic approach allows to see prospects
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1157
for a “heterocentric mnemonical vision”29 to emerge, and to avoid the binarizing
“narrative structure of victims and perpetrators”30; instead we look at the opposing
positions as marking a broad spectrum of various policies and attitudes toward history.
Within this spectrum each agency is a complex conglomerate of different,
including conflictual, articulations and perceptions, rather than a fixed position.
Tallinn 2007: The Bronze Soldier and Afterwards
The removal of the monument to the Soviet soldiers from Tallinn downtown in
2007 was a major incident that triggered an outburst of anti-Estonian rhetoric in
Moscow and further deteriorated relations between the Estonian and Russophone
communities. What on the surface might resemble a typically modernist gesture of
reclaiming the historical truth, under a closer scrutiny appears to be a set of much
more complex and nuanced aesthetic interventions.
Important for our analysis is the fact that the overall frame of the conflict was
marked by an ostensible bipolarity, which was aesthetically reflected in—and sustained
by—a symbolic competition between monuments to soldiers who were fighting
on the opposite sides in WWII. Two incidents preceding the Bronze Soldier
removal are particularly worthwhile mentioning in this respect. One is related to an
attempt to build a monument to an Estonian soldier in German uniform, resembling
German recruitment posters, in Pärnu in 2002. Due to its political controversy and
the evidently divisive effects the statue was removed before the official unveiling
ceremony. Another incident was the erection of a similar monument in the town of
Lihula, with the dedication “To the Estonian men who fought against Bolshevism in
1940–1945 and for the restoration of Estonian independence.” Two weeks after the
unveiling the monument was demolished, which sparked an intense public debate:
“why did the government remove a monument to those Estonians who fought against
communism, but tolerated another monument in the heart of the capital celebrating a
totalitarian regime?”31 In other words, “if Nazi symbols were forbidden in the EU
because they glorified a totalitarian regime, then Communist symbols should also be
banned.”32 Needless to say that the debate unfolded under the condition of “diametrically
opposite”33 opinions on that matter expressed and advocated for in the Estonian
national discourse and among Estonian Russophones.
This polarizing structure of the collision sidelined all attempts to find a compromise—such
as, for example, the replacement of the Soviet commemorative text on
the Bronze Soldier statue (“Eternal glory for the heroes who have fallen for the liberation
and sovereignty of our country”) with a more neutral one (“For the fallen in
the Second World War”). Suggestions to balance the monument by a cross symbolizing
Christian values and thus creating an aesthetic counterweight to the Soviet
power did not lead anywhere either. Equally futile were the attempts to divest the
monument of its symbolic functions through planting lime trees “to separate the site
1158  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
from the neighboring street [and turn it] into a single object standing alone, without
the support of a spatial context.”34 Moreover, the relocation of the Bronze Soldier
gave a new boost to the binarization of the urban aesthetics: “Parallel with the
removal of the Bronze Soldier and inspired by national sentiment, the government
made preparations for erecting a new monument in Tallinn: the War of Independence
Victory Column”35 to commemorate the only war Estonia had won in its history. The
construction of the new monument in the form of a gigantic cross spurred further
debate in the Estonian society: in the opinion of an art expert, “pseudo-nationalism,
briefly introduced into politics again, requires for its survival an opposing side, ‘nonEstonians’
as well as ‘not sufficiently patriotic Estonians.’”36
The polarized approach to urban sites of memory that was dominant in Estonia
since the regaining of independence resonated with equally bipolar Russian political
gaze at this country where, in the Kremlin’s interpretation, the nationalist majority
subjugates the Russophone minority. This binary logic was repeatedly reiterated by
the Russian propaganda whose message was pretty blunt: “if one does not accept the
fact that the Red Army liberated Europe from fascism, then the one supports fascism,
the biggest evil in the world.”37 What the Russian gaze—intentionally or inadvertently—failed
to notice is that the binary structure of commemorative sites in Estonia
has gradually started losing its “black-and-white” character and began transforming
into much more diverse urban imaginaries replete with more flexible and less divisive
lines of distinction.
To start with, the Bronze Soldier story in Tallinn has sparked a series of artistic
deconstructions of the polarizing discourse and the concomitant binary oppositions.
The interpretation of the Bronze Soldier after its relocation has changed to be less
imperialistic—i.e. the commemoration side is now the most prominent, not liberation
of Estonia and the World from fascism. A good example would be Kristina
Kalamees’ short film that desacralized the Soviet-style symbolism through a punkstyle
story of the platonic love of a girl for the Bronze Soldier, thus imagining the
statue as an ideal man.38 Another Estonian artist Kristina Norman produced a series
of deconstructive imageries of the Bronze Soldier. In her short film “Monolith” the
Bronze Soldier (known also as Alyosha among the local Russophones) was represented
as a foreign object catapulted onto Estonia from Russia and ignited a deep
split within the society, which ultimately led to a forceful removal of the petrified
“body” of the soldier from its place in such a way that only his boots remained on the
plinth. Accompanied by the ominous music, the public quarrel between Estonian
nationalists and Russian activists reanimated a skeleton lying beneath the pedestal
and provoked a flood that sank the whole city into the sea. However, Alyosha reincarnated
in an image of a child who in the soldier’s boots headed back to outer
space.39
Another of Norman’s art works, “After-War,” represents her experiment with
reinstalling an allegedly golden copy of the Bronze Soldier to years after its relocation.
This “art research project” featured a re-installation of an even “better” Alyosha,
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1159
his hyperbolically over-determined comeback, which provoked some critical remarks
from Estonian politicians.40 In yet one more of Norman’s videos she—under a nickname—filmed
herself selling small figurines of the Bronze Soldier to elderly
Russian-speaking women in the military cemetery, thus checking how much they
needed them—as cult objects—in their everyday lives. Since the scene took place on
the 9th of May, Norman was criticized by her colleagues for interfering into the
sacred sphere of the V-Day celebration.41 In her own words, she wanted
to highlight the religious substance of the rituals practiced by the Russian community
in Estonia. With my action I am not only targeting the Russian community who practices
these rituals, but also their Other, who has, via technocratic means and methods,
violently intruded into something that they don’t really have a clue about.42
Tanja Muravskaja’s art installation “Monuments” visually juxtaposed two mounds
of an equal size—one of limestone (the material of which the Bronze Soldier statue
was made), another of glass shards that represent the new monument to Estonia’s
victory in the Independence war.43 Both look symmetrical to each other, yet the high
symbolism of the corresponding monuments in Russophone and Estonian national
discourses is decomposed in a physical sense so that each of the symbols turns into
a pile of construction materials of different nature and visually resembling each other.
These deconstructive interpretations of the Bronze Soldier saga, with a sense of
sarcasm hidden in some of them, have contested the rigidity of the original “us-versus-them”
binary opposition, and opened up the cultural space of Tallinn for more
nuanced representations of Estonian identity. The centenary anniversary of Estonian
independence in 2018 was marked by a series of cultural events meant to represent
the Estonian nation through the images of ordinary people from different generations
and backgrounds. Examples are two photo exhibitions: “Estonia through 100 pairs
of eyes” by Kaire van der Toorn-Guthan, and “The History of a Hundred” by Kaupo
Kikkas.44 Both artists came up with the idea of making 100 portraits of 100 Estonians
as a visualized memory of nationhood spanning the whole century.45 The Estonian
collective self in both cases is represented beyond divisive issues of race, ethnicity or
social status (cultural and political celebrities share the space of the exposition with
ordinary people). These facial visualizations made the idea of the nation an epitome
of a common and inherently inclusive space for all ages, genders, professions, and
social roles. The photo exhibition “Ours” (Omad) installed in the central park of
Tallinn in 2019 had the same message—to unveil the diversity of Estonians through
exposing different ethnicities and lifestyles, which ostensibly challenges the uniform
and exclusionary understanding of the nation.
Another example of this trend is the rebranding of the Occupation Museum into the
Museum of Occupation and Freedom in Tallinn in 2019. The change of name implied
the new content moving away from a “singular and prescriptive emphasis on Estonian
suffering and victimhood” toward a greater variety of personal experiences and stories
1160  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
including those embracing “individual happiness under occupation or the normalization
of late socialism.”46 The reconceptualized exhibition “deconstructs the impression of a
homogeneous ethnic community by presenting memories both of people who maintained
a strong Estonian identity as well as of those who fully assimilated and lost any
emotional attachment to their former homeland.”47 Critics of the semiotic dissolution of
the historically specific concept of occupation into a series of more general representations
of freedom presumed that the new concept of the Museum would please those in
the Kremlin who prefer to de-emphasize everything related to the Soviet occupation,48
but—ironically—Russians failed to notice these changes in style and in form.
Therefore, in Estonia the discourse “is no longer as unvaried, monolithic and
unchallenged . . . More complicated stories can thus be told about individual fortunes
in wars and under occupation.”49 As many authors noted, Estonia gives up on
the idea of consensus in relation to the past, and instead embraces the notion of
debate and competition that is at the heart of democracy.50 “How to treat public space
and properly commemorate the past remain highly contested issues among ethnic
Estonians as well, as seen in the recent divisive debate over a monument to the War
of Independence in Tallinn’s central square that takes form of a massive “freedom
cross.”51 When it comes to Estonian Russophones, most of them accepted the reappearance
of the Swedish Lion statue in Narva that otherwise could “potentially be
understood as part of a state-sponsored effort to banish the Soviet past and reconnect
with a past ‘Golden Age’.”52 This confirms that dyadic structures are not operational,
since in between a self and an other there is space for different “figures that cannot
be affirmatively characterised as either one or the other.”53
Prague’s 2019 to 2020 Monument Wars: The “Bloody Marshal”
More than a decade later, with new tensions between Russia and the West
having emerged after the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas, in
Prague we could observe similar tensions between binarized, Manichean views
on history and polyphonic and deconstructive ones. We thus argue that one way
to understand the 2019 to 2020 conflict between Russian and Czech perspectives
on historical monuments in Prague is to see it as a conflict of different underlying
philosophies of dealing with the past. The official Russian perspective has
been built on the assumed possibility of interpreting historical truth as final and
absolute. It implied that Marshal Konev or the ROA soldiers could be located
within a Manichean demarcation of historical figures into the good and the evil.
This straightforwardness naturally suggests a heroization of these figures (or
their unconditional anathemization) and is thus also of an inherently moralizing
nature. The belief in absolute moral truth even brings it closer to a religious cult,
so this type of dealing with the past, as in the Estonian case, can be compared to
worship where the historical narrative becomes a form of preaching. Notably,
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1161
the comparison of the “Great Patriotic War” cult to religious worship amounts to
more than just a figure of speech. Indeed, researchers have identified the Soviet
war commemorations as “a quasi-religious rite”54 or the last living element of
the Soviet “Party-run civil religion.”55 The war became “a sacred event that
could not be questioned,” while attempts to challenge the collective memory
were seen as a “sacrilege.”56 The celebrations of the War also visibly inherited
some cultural forms from the Russian religious heritage, for instance, the parade
of veteran photographs “resembles the Russian cultural tradition of carrying
icons in religious processions.”57 The “Immortal Regiment” movement, popularized
under Putin, establishes a symbolic, sacred link between the living and the
dead, and the figure of the Red Army soldier is “framed as a mythical progenitor
and a shared forefather for all the peoples of post-Soviet space.”58
Consequently, as some researchers argue, the narrative about the Great Patriotic
War has continued “to revolve around simplistic binaries” inhibiting “Russian historians
from offering more nuanced and objective studies of the war years.”59 This sacralized
nature of the collective memory of the War and the assumption of the absolute
nature of historical truth are also closely linked to a sense of moral superiority supported
by the notion of the “great sacrifice” that the Russian (Soviet) people made
during World War II, by liberating Europe, including the Czech Republic, from
Nazism. Symbolic re-appropriation of this sacrifice by the present-day Russian state
allows it to claim supremacy over those that were liberated. This, in turn, blends with
the traditionally hierarchical attitude which Russia as a great power adopts toward the
small Central and Eastern European states that used to be part of its sphere of influence
and on which it continues to have a symbolic claim via its interpretations of
collective memory. The monument thus becomes a form of aesthetic control over the
former imperial space, a marker of domination underpinned by sacral semantics.
As compared to the official Russian gaze, the Czech perspectives, on the other
hand, should be seen in the plural. This reflects both the much more decentralized
nature of political power in a democratic state as opposed to authoritarian rule, and
the complexity and inherent ambiguity of historical issues and figures that need to
be addressed. To begin with, some actors in the Czech Republic were rather sympathetic
with the official Russian interpretations. Thus, the Communist Party of
Bohemia and Moravia lambasted the decision of the Dejvice municipality to move
the Konev statue to a museum as part of an “anti-Communist and anti-Russian campaign.”60
Criticism also came from President Miloš Zeman, whose official spokesperson
Jiří Ovčáček even attended previous protests held against the decision to veil
the statue that was adopted by the municipality following the vandalizaiton of the
monument with red paint.61 As Czech analysts argued, the presence of these actors
in the Czech political space allowed the Russian media to create a “picture of division
and polarization of the Czech society.”62
However, there are two other approaches that should be singled out as standing in
contrast to the position of moral superiority and the belief in absolute historical truth.
1162  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
The first approach is built on the understanding of history and its figures as often
being ambiguous and internally contradictory. Therefore, rather than requiring
heroization, they are in need of being understood and interpreted in their inherent
complexity and from multiple perspectives, as didactic or reflexive: history is a lesson
and food for thought rather than a ready-made truth. The second and related approach
is built on postmodern irony which helps to deal with the tragic contradictions of the
past. Irony can also be a powerful tool for countering the narratives of absolute truth.
The two case studies from Prague we examine below illustrate this point.
In November 2019 Russia’s Channel One released a news story claiming that the
Dejvice municipality in Prague was planning to replace the monument to Marshal
Konev with a monument to the ROA soldiers. As reported by the Russian Channel
One, the idea of switching monuments was presented by the municipality head at an
annual conference dedicated to ROA, funded and attended by representatives of the
US State Department.63 As it turned out, Channel One had effectively conflated two
different stories. In 2019, the Prague municipality of Dejvice, presided by Ondřej
Kolář, had in fact been discussing the possibilities of moving the Konev statue to a
museum and replacing it with another monument which paid tribute to the liberation
of Prague. In Řeporyje, a different municipality located in another corner of Prague,
the head of its self-government Pavel Novotný was pushing for commemorating the
participation of ROA in the 1945 liberation of Prague, not with a large monument,
however, but with a plaque and a small sign.
Apart from indifference to fact checking on the part of Russian outlets that reproduced
the same story,64 this conflation is indicative of several important things.
Firstly, this coverage signals a total lack of interest in the local context on the part of
the Russian state media narrative. The hierarchical approach toward the former
“informal empire”65 does not in fact require any such understanding, as it superimposes
the imperial vision without due sensitivity for the local nuances, whether factual
or interpretational. Much more importantly, however, the Russian media
narrative on the Prague monuments was that proverbial drop of water which reflected
the ocean, in other words, the overarching Russian notions of memory politics as a
zero-sum game between competing and clashing narratives, “our Truth” vs. “theirs.”
Within that cognitive frame, for the sake of imperial consistency, the removal of the
Konev statue could not have been anything but a hostile act, and the statue simply
had to be replaced with its symbolic antipode, an analogous monument to ROA. This
frame of perception rests both on a Manichean view on historical characters as
divided unambiguously into the “good” and the “evil” as well as on a “securitized”66
approach to memory, which implies that every “unorthodox” interpretation endangers
the absolute moral truth embedded in the imperial narrative, and is therefore
essentially a camouflaged act of war.
The contemporary Russian strategy of using World War II to securitize political
opponents has been well documented.67 In accordance with it, Russia’s minister of
culture Medinsky branded Dejvice mayor Ondřej Kolář “a Gauleiter” (a Nazi Party
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1163
regional leader), and Russian media suggested that those who wanted to move monuments
were “Nazi collaborators.”68 These projections of WWII images onto the present
illustrate the Manichean and securitized perspective which leaves no room for
local nuances, ambiguities and contextual re-significations of monuments. What’s
more, this insensitivity reveals the persistence of a hierarchical approach toward
Central and Eastern Europe which the Russian discourse symbolically re-appropriates
through what it sees as “its” monuments. In 2020, Russian officials requested
that the Konev statue be turned over to Russia,69 despite the fact that the Prague
monument was originally created and installed by Czechoslovak authorities and
could thus be property of none other than Czechoslovakia’s successor states. While
this request could still be interpreted as a gesture of good will, i.e. offering symbolic
“asylum” to a “persecuted” monument, foreign minister Lavrov’s subsequent statements
that the Konev statue “must be re-installed” sounded much more imperative.70
The opening by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation of a criminal
case to investigate a case of defiling monuments of Russian military glory (article
354 of the Russia’s Penal Code)71 was de facto a criminal procedure against democratically
elected self-government bodies of another sovereign country, as the official
response from the Czech Foreign Ministry pointed out.72 In a yet more sinister
follow up, the mayor of Prague Zdeněk Hřib, and the mayors of the Dejvice and
Řeporyje municipalities, were given police protection in April 2020, as a reputable
Czech magazine Respekt published leaked information about the arrival to the Czech
Republic of Russian secret agents, who posed a security threat to the three Prague
politicians.73 Following the statue removal, the Czech embassy in Moscow was also
attacked by groups of radicals.
The Russian official approach built around notions of absolute moral truth and
used to discipline and to symbolically appropriate the post-imperial space can be
compared with the Czech approaches. In order to properly understand the differences,
one needs to appreciate the broader historical context, identities, and the
political meanings that are collectively attached to particular historical monuments.
Thus, the Konev statue was installed by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in
1980 in the midst of the so-called normalization era, a period that followed the 1968
crushing of the Prague spring by the Warsaw Pact members led by Moscow.
Normalization was characterized by broad political repression and censorship,
meant to eradicate the very possibility of dissident, unorthodox, that is, non-Sovietauthorized
political developments in Czechoslovakia. Moscow adopted an approach,
subsequently dubbed the “Brezhnev doctrine,” recognizing the sovereignty of its
satellites only to the extent that they did not breach its ideological orthodoxy. In the
opposite case, it reserved the right to intervene to save the “people’s democracy”
from “revisionism.”
Unsurprisingly, the Konev monument could easily be associated with the events
of 1968 more than with those of 1945—which it was officially said to commemorate.
Konev was also tied to the broader context of the Cold War through his leading role
1164  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
in the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, a Soviet intervention into another
member of the Warsaw Pact. The Prague statue was vandalized with red paint and
graffiti “No to the bloody marshal.”74 Others pointed out to Konev’s participation in
the Berlin crisis which eventually led to the building of the Berlin Wall and even to
his (disputed) participation in the planning of the 1968 to Czechoslovakia as a consultant.
To some, this context made “the Dejvice Marshal” a “medium of the great
power politics of the Soviet Union who had bloody connotations.”75
Despite this, the original decision, adopted by the Dejvice municipal self-government
in 2015, in response to petitions for removing the statue, was not built on an
either/or logic. Following consultations with professional historians, the monument
was supplied with a new plaque which emphasized the controversial role Konev
playedinhistory,listingbothhisparticipationinthe1945liberationofCzechoslovakia
from Nazism, and his negative role in Berlin (1961), Hungary (1956), and
Czechoslovakia in 1968. Explaining the decision of the self-government, Dejvice
mayor Ondřej Kolář said that “it would be a shame not to use the statue, since it is
already here, and could be used as an educational tool showing what our society
went through in the 20th century.”76
This attempt to turn the Konev statue from a sacral symbol into an educational
monument marks an approach to history as being inherently complex and ambiguous.
The role of memory politics is not to heroize or preach but to stimulate reflection
on these inherent dislocations and the multiplicity of perspectives and contexts
that can be tied to historical figures. This approach can be seen as desacralizing and
demonumentalizing, but also as depoliticizing as the statue could no longer be identified
as an aesthetic pillar of one political narrative, but only as a meeting point of
different perspectives on history. The approach was nevertheless immediately securitized.
The Communist Party of Czech Republic accused the municipality of
“rewriting history,” while the Russian Embassy claimed that altering the monument
was a dangerous precedent, threatening the memory of “the common heroic struggle
of our nations against Nazism.”77
The post-political, educational approach could not be sustained in the end, as
vandalizations of the statue continued, and the Dejvice authorities decided to veil
it first and then to move it to a museum, planning to replace it with a politically
more neutral monument to the 1945 liberators of Prague. The Russian reaction to
the original desacralization of the monument, however, illustrates well that multiplicity
of perspectives is not something that Moscow is prepared to accept. Its
zero-sum game approach to historical memory demands unconditional heroization
as well as claims an exclusive right to interpreting the meaning of monuments in
the post-imperial space.
The second case study reveals a similar clash of perspectives albeit with an added
element of irony as a form of both dealing with the contradictory past and desecuritizing
collective memories. In 2019-2020, in parallel to the debate on the Konev monument,
another controversy developed in the district of Řeporyje on the north-western
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1165
outskirts of the capital. Its mayor Pavel Novotný decided to install a plaque and a
counter-commemorative78 sign to honor the participation of the ROA in the 1945
liberation of Prague.79 The plaque text was not dissimilar to the original approach of
Dejvice to Konev. It emphasized the decisive role of ROA soldiers in the 1945 Prague
uprising against the German forces, and in liberating Prague. By the same token, it
also mentioned the “multiple controversies” associated with the “anti-Stalinist” ROA.
The text ended with a bilingual quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag
Archipelago: “But who knows whether all of them [i.e. all of the Czechs—authors]
remembered later which Russians had saved their city?”80 The Solzhenitsyn quote can
be understood as a reference to both the dramatic character of the 20th-century Russian
and European history and its ambiguous nature which allows for “anti-Stalinist” allies
of Nazi Germany to be seen as saviors of Prague in some contexts.
The text is complemented by a small sized pillar with a tiny sculpture on top,
featuring a Soviet tank capped by a German helmet. This exercise in sad irony is,
apparently, meant to represent the inherently contradictory nature of ROA fighters
whose hatred for the Stalinist Soviet Union pushed them toward a pact with the devil.
The author of the plaque (and also the suspected author of the mini sculpture) is the
renowned Czech sculptor David Černý who is known for his postmodernist, “hooligan”
inversions of culturally significant symbols and images. For instance, he
authored the famous statue of King Wenceslas on an upside-down dead horse, a
parody of the revered patron saint of the Czech lands, whose statue towers over the
nearby Wenceslas square (Václavské náměstí). Černý’s visual “rhetoric of parody
and provocation”81 fits well with the sophisticated Czech taste for the ironic (pungent
self-irony included) and the absurd which has haunted the Bohemian intellectual
landscape since the times of Kafka and Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk. This
spirit of irony has made its way into the ROA commemorating sign and, in this context
it can also be seen as one way of dealing with the absurd and internally contradictory
nature of historical figures and events which sometimes present us with
seemingly irreconcilable facts—such as ROA’s alliance with Nazi Germany and its
participation in the anti-German uprising that relieved Prague.
Irony, in this case, functions as an additional depoliticizing instrument. It commemorates
without straightforward solemn heroization, and it also serves as an antidote
to militarization which has been traditional function of humor and satire.82
Furthermore, in that capacity, it works to undermine the Russian securitization of
collective memory, stigmatizing projections of WII images onto the present, and the
new imilitarism embedded in the Great Patriotic War cult. Needless to say, the official
Russian reaction to the Řeporyje initiative was hostile. The Russian embassy in
Prague issued a statement to the effect that it was all part of a revision of the WWII
results and contradicted “basic” (but unspecified) international norms.83
Previously, Řeporyje district mayor Pavel Novotný also appeared via the internet
in a propagandistic “talk show” on the state-owned Russia-1 channel, where he
clashed with pro-Kremlin commentators. His deliberately informal behavior
1166  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
included laughing, constantly making faces, lighting a cigarette, and above all,
calling the Russians commentators “drunk,” “stoned,” incompetent and liars.84 In
Czech politics, Novotný is a well-known trickster, with a political style marked by
use of transgressive, provocative remarks and actions. In his interaction with the
Russian state TV his deliberately unserious approach contrasted sharply with the
solemn indignation and, indeed, verbal aggression displayed by the Moscow commentators
who accused him of trying to redeem a war criminal condemned by the
Nuremberg trials.
The contrast between the Russian solemn seriousness, and Novotný’s comical,
jesting approach, corresponds to the traditional function of comedy as “liberating
and subverting domination” and “opening the possibility of communication across
divides.”85 In contemporary cultural studies the “trickster” is discussed as a transgressive
comedian, and a challenger to the monologue of hegemonic discourses with
a “license to disrupt and redefine.”86 Consequently, Czech irony, epitomized by
Novotný’s encounters with the Russian TV, also functions as a disrupting tool that
subverts the discourse of moral superiority and, through humoristic performances,
works to desecuritize collective memory. Irony can thus be seen as an important
component of the pluralistic and depoliticized approaches to history as opposed to
presumption of the zero-sum game logic of memory wars.
Russia as a “Mnemonic Warrior”
The case studies juxtaposed in this article exposed the characteristic of the
Kremlin as a “mnemonic warrior,” a concept introduced by Kubik and Bernhard. In
their interpretation, “mnemonic warriors tend to draw a sharp line between themselves
(as proprietors of the ‘true’ vision of the past) and other actors who cultivate
‘wrong’ or ‘false’ versions of history. They usually believe that the historical truth is
attainable and that once it is attained it needs to become the foundation of social and
political life.”87
Russia’s mnemonic warriorship includes a projection of the Soviet aesthetics
into the new and qualitatively transformed reality of the former socialist and Soviet
countries. In a documentary “The Bronze Cleavage” dedicated to the tenth anniversary
of the Bronze Night in Tallinn, a Russophone resident of Tallinn articulates
this projection quite lucidly: “In the Soviet times we were proud of this memorial;
that is why it is so important to us nowadays.”88 This retrospection is accompanied
by what might be dubbed a necropolitical reappropriation of the fallen soldiers
who in contemporary Russian discourse are referred to as “our heroes.” This appropriation
merges individual bodies into a collective imperial body characterized by
a trans-ethnic nationalist nostalgia—in the sense that it is articulated on behalf of
the Russophone community yet reaches far beyond ethnic lines. For example, the
Russian discourse makers are fully aware that the Bronze Soldier was created by
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1167
an ethnically Estonian sculptor and modeled after an Estonian prototype, yet they
still sacralize—and identify themselves with—the monument. In the case of the
Konev statue the appropriation was expressed by the references to “our monument”
that needs to be “returned,” despite the fact that it was created in
Czechoslovakia and belongs to the municipal self-governance. This testifies to
Russia’s moral right to interfere in controversial issues related to reshuffling and
reconfiguring the places of memory, thus ex-territorially interiorizing the material
remnants of the Soviet era and re-signifying them as allegedly belonging to the
Russia-protected historical pedigree.
Russia’s high sensitivity to all critical discussions concerning the role of the
Soviet Army during and after WWII is connected to the nostalgic and retrospective
memory politics promoted by the Kremlin.89 “While Russia bears full responsibility
for initiating the memory wars with its neighboring states, the Russian Federation
sought to accuse the Central-East European countries of unleashing them by blaming
the Eastern Europeans for not paying due respect to the memory of the fallen Soviet
soldiers.”90 On numerous occasions the Russian government leveled “strongest criticism
against Russians and foreigners who perceive the Great Patriotic War of 1941-
1945 not as a heroic crusade against the evils of Nazism but as a death-struggle
between two totalitarian systems which brought vast human loss and enabled the
Soviet victor to strengthen repression at home and in newly communized lands.”91
This attitude is correlative to domestically nurtured feelings of nostalgia, complemented
by a creeping re-Stalinization, both within Russia and in Russian de-facto
protectorates, anecdotat examples of which were the renaming of Donetsk into
Stalino, Luhansk into Voroshilovgrad and Tskhinvali into Stalilnir for a period from
May 9 (Victory Day) to June 22 (the beginning of the Great Patriotic War), 2020.
Russia’s instrumentalization of memory narratives allows Moscow to exert its
symbolic power through interfering in the discussions on WWII and even giving
legal qualifications to them. In the formerly Soviet/socialist countries this policy has
to face practices of “commemorating the victims of the communist era. Eastern
Europe thus appears as an area of disasters, suffering, and trauma. Moreover, the
desire to recognize the suffering of unrecognized victims sometimes causes “‘martyrological
competition’ in which focusing on one kind of suffering obscures the suffering
of other groups.”92 It is in this symbolic universe of ideational and material
signs, performances and representations that Russia interferes, accusing its opponents
of “rewriting history” and demanding respect from them.
From a practical perspective, from 2007 to 2020, the instruments of Russian
memory politics became more diverse. Thus, after the removal of the Konev monument
the Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in a letter to his Czech colleague
demanded the transportation of the statue to Russia, for which the Russian
government offered financial compensation. However, the Czech government
declined the proposal, referring to the fact that the statue belongs to the local
municipal authorities. Obviously, the rejection sparked a storm of indignation in
1168  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
the pro-Kremlin media. In the meantime, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov has mentioned a possible “American trace” in the removal operation,
referring to a US-based consulting company that worked with the municipal
authorities in Prague. This version was amplified to the level of conspiracy theories
by the Kremlin-loyal journalists. In the media multiple pro-Kremlin mouthpieces
called for “acting as robustly as Americans” and forcefully bringing foreign
officials to Russian court for trials. In the same vein, many Russian public voices
(including, for example, the head of the foreign department of the Russian
Orthodox Church the metropolitan Illarion) called for “symmetric responses,”
ranging from a proposal to rename the Prazhskaya (Prague) metro station in
Moscow to discontinuing all measures related to preserving the graves of Czech
nationals buried in Russia. By the same token, the Russian Historical Museum
opened a virtual exposition dedicated to Ivan Konev, which might be categorized
as a cultural response to the Prague incident.
However, Russia’s externally projected imperial memory politics proves to be
very precarious. On a general note, the “aesthetic turn revealed a kind of vulnerability
of states (and—Authors) brought to light states’ concern with their own representation
and self-representation”93 This “aesthetic vulnerability” has only strengthened
Russia’s dependence on the sphere of symbolic politics, and put Russia in a defensive
position—such as, for example, when the Russian Embassy in the Czech
Republic has officially refused to use for diplomatic correspondence the new address
with Boris Nemtsov’s name in it.
As a result, Russian memory politics exposed an intricate and paradoxical interlacing
of hegemony and subalternity. In the extant literature one may find a distinction
between “visibility-as-control” produced by power holders versus
“visibility-as-recognition” that “refers to the claiming and appropriation of space by
subaltern groups.”94 In this regard, Russia’s claims for aesthetic hegemony in the
post-Soviet / post-socialist space ended up with playing the role of a subaltern who
desperately needs visibility and appreciation and struggles for recognition and acceptance.
Arguably, Kremlin’s memory politics pushed Russia to the margins of the
mainstream memory discourse in countries that have been either occupied or colonized
by the Soviet Union.
The projection of aesthetic hegemony into the post-imperial space is built on a
zero-sum game logic. In principle, as the authors of the soft power concept argue for
instance, culture can be a source of a non-zero-sum-game power of attraction which
does not necessarily involve clashes or struggles. Different narratives and symbols
can coexist peacefully. In our case, however, the vulnerability of the subaltern hegemon,
who operates in a permanent recognition seeking mode, makes it securitize
historical memory. Hence, the sensitive reactions to any perceived competition from
alternative interpretations. These reactions are easily triggered even by smaller alterations
of aesthetic objects (such as the replacement of the plaque on the Konev statue
in Prague), and as a result these alterations are framed as hostile attempts to rewrite
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1169
history. Thus, in comparison to standard cultural soft power, we are talking about
securitized aesthetic hegemony attempts.
Russia’s over-inflation of—and over-investments into—the sphere of political
symbolism beyond national borders affects the broader spectrum of relations with
the EU where two different approaches toward Moscow compete with each other.
One of them encourages Brussels’ dialogic relations with the Kremlin and refrains
from treating Russia as Europe’s existential Other, while another is oriented toward
countering and opposing Russia’s views on international politics.95 Obviously, the
extrapolation of Russia’s memory politics from domestic contexts to foreign policy
realm only strengthens the second position within the EU, and therefore complicates
any possible rapprochement between Russia and the EU.
Apart from specific cases of monuments’ removals, the findings of this study
might be useful for a broader discussion on Russian subjectivity. On the one hand,
it is true that Russia has, in recent years, been described as a “postmodernist dictatorship”96
or “transideological” actor,97 which corresponds to the logic of a decentered
subject.98 Moscow has been seen as spoiler power that opportunistically
plugs into different narratives and ideologies.99 However, as far as the regime discourse
is concerned, this postmodern approach does not seem to extend to some of
the most important pillars of the regime such as Putin’s image as a powerful leader,
or sacrosanct values such as the legacy of the Great Patriotic War or the so-called
traditional values. In fact, the existing analyses of the regimes’ practices as “postmodernist”
notwithstanding—over years, the Russian regime seems to have
evolved from being “post-ideological”100 into developing a strong nationalistic
ideology which has left very little room for postmodern self-irony. The 2014 war
in Ukraine served as a powerful catalyst, however, even prior to that a “traditionalist”
turn in Russian politics could be observed, which was well illustrated by the
harsh reaction to the 2012 postmodernist Pussy Riot performance, or by other
attacks on postmodern activism in Russia. In sum, while we do not dispute the
conceptual validity of existing depictions of some of the practices of Russian
domestic and foreign policy as “postmodernist,” this particular approach to memory
politics is not informed by them. When it comes to securitized memory objects,
Russia is both unable or unwilling to embrace the complexity of postmodernist
deconstruction—arguably because its memory politics is strongly securitized and
refer to the ideological pillars of its present political regime.
Yet, having waged memory wars with former Soviet / socialist countries,
Russia still attempts to position itself within a broadly understood European political
milieu. This might be seen in the frequent references to vaguely defined
“European norms” (“in no normal European country something like this might
have happened”), as well as in discursive distinction between “good Europeans”
(such as Germans or French) who honor the Soviet war legacy, and “bad
Europeans” (Poland and the Baltic states, as well as Ukraine) who “rewrite” and
“falsify” history on political grounds.
1170  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Conclusion
In this comparative study we tried to bring together and find a synergy between
memory, foreign policy and urban cultural landscapes. In each of these spheres we
have seen its own dynamics, and all three elements of this triangle are closely connected
to each other. Memory politics in the two countries we have analyzed are
becoming more diverse and less uniform, which creates a gap with the continuously
uniform, rigid, and top-down historical and commemorative narratives promoted by
the Russian government and part of the nationalistically minded public. Changes in
memory politics in Estonia and Czech Republic, exemplified by the removal of the
Soviet-era military monuments, were not only aimed at symbolically detaching these
countries from the Russian vision of history, but also directly affected urban milieus
in Tallinn and Prague, bringing more plurality of expressions and new cultural forms
into city architectonics. This growing diversity replenished urban spaces in both
Tallinn and Prague with visual messages, images, and symbols calling for mourning
the victims, rather than for celebrating the war victory, which reflects the continuing
process of historical, cultural, and aesthetic decolonization.
Though located in the same broader region of the post-Communist Central and
Eastern Europe, the two countries naturally demonstrate important differences in
terms of their history, culture as well as their historical patterns of relations with the
neighboring imperial powers and their colonial projects. However, one key similarity,
which became the common denominator for our analysis, is the necessity to deal
with a colonial legacy that is tightly intertwined with historical traumas and collective
memory dilemmas, which are not always easily solved. Consequently, one
important conclusion here is that the plurality of possible interpretations of symbols
and monuments in the Czech Republic and Estonia cannot be reduced to the influence
of external actors, and to the clash between the “foreign” and the “domestic”
approaches. On the contrary, memory dilemmas in CEE stem from the complexity
and inherent ambiguity of historical issues, whose significance can often be multifaceted.
This is evident, for instance, from the ambiguous role played in Prague by
the ROA fighters, but also from other questionable aspects of the Soviet monuments
in Estonia, which, depending on the context, could be interpreted as symbols of foreign
domination and part of the shared European legacy of the anti-Nazi struggle.
Furthermore, when it comes to memory politics, the plurality of perspectives and
the postmodernization of interpretations correspond to the polyarchic nature of
democracies, which allows for autonomy and a role for local self-government in
decision making. It is in this sense that the two cases in question can be juxtaposed
to the authoritarian top-down decision making in Russia’s present political system,
and to the strategic use of consolidated, Manichean narratives in the Kremlin’s foreign
policy. From its part, the Kremlin’s instrumentalized memory politics as a part
of geopolitical toolkit is meant to symbolically reconnect the two countries with
their Soviet-dominated past. As we have shown, Russian reactions to incidents
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1171
related to relocations of WWII monuments included diplomatic, discursive and performative
incursions into the sphere of urban aesthetics. By doing so, the Russian
state claimed its ambition to have its say on what can / should be seen, how and in
what contexts the material signs have to be verbalized, and—concomitantly—what
has to remain silent or hidden.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iDs
Aliaksei Kazharski https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9782-7746
Andrey Makarychev https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0751-2653
Notes
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Critique 50 (2009): 41–57.
  22. C. Boano, “‘Violent Spaces’: Production and Reproduction of Security and Vulnerabilities,” The
Journal of Architecture 16 (2011): 44.
  23. S. Troitskiy, “Sintaksis Utraty, [The Syntaxis of the Loss]” in Topologiya Travmy [Topology of
the Trauma], ed. N. Artiomenko (St. Petersburg: Renome Publisher, 2020), 67–81, 95.
  24. C. Weber, “Performative States,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27 (1998): 89.
  25. A. Y. Jackson, “Performativity Identified,” Qualitative Inquiry 10 (2004): 675.
  26. L. Nelson, “Bodies (and Spaces) Do Matter: The Limits of Performativity,” Gender, Place and
Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 6 (1999): 339.
 27. Within this broader anti-modernist logic, however, it probably makes sense to also distinguish
between deconstruction and destruction. Destruction is radical and sometimes blind, driven by political emotions
and that have their roots in social and ideological cleavages. This is a radical anti-modernist revolt.
Deconstruction, on the other hand, requires a much more nuanced approach. Postmodernist irony has the power
to pull down the modernist semantics of monuments without necessarily requiring their physical demolition.
  28. L. Frost, “Aesthetics and Politics,” Global Society 24 (2010): 435.
  29. M. Mälksoo, “The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and
the Collective Memory of Europe,” European Journal of International Relations 15 (2009): 673.
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(2010): 386.
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Estonia,” Nationalities Papers 36 (2008): 432.
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Bronze Soldier Conflict,” Darbai ir Dienos 54 (2010): 108.
 33. V. Poleshchuk, “The War of the Monuments in Estonia: The Challenges of History and the
Minority Population,” Rapport från Ålands fredsinstitut 1 (2009): 11.
  34. M. Ehala, “The Bronze Soldier: Identity Threat and Maintenance in Estonia,” Journal of Baltic
Studies 40 (2009): 141.
 35. M. Tamm, “In Search of Lost Time: Memory Politics in Estonia, 1991–2011,” Nationalities
Papers 41 (2013): 666.
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1173
  36. M. Lagerspetz, “The Public Debate,” Estonian Art 1/2 (2008): 6.
 37. H. Pääbo, “War of Memories: Explaining ‘Memorials War’ in Estonia,” Baltic Security &
Defense Review 10 (2008): 22.
 38. Instabusters, “#bronzesoldier,” n.d., https://instabusters.net/hashtag-photos/bronzesoldier
(accessed 21 June 2020).
 39. K. Norman, “Monolith,” n.d., https://www.kristinanorman.ee/monolith/ (accessed 21 June
2020).
 40. K. Norman, “After War,” n.d., https://www.kristinanorman.ee/after-war/ (accessed 21 June
2020).
  41. V. Ladõnskaja, K. Norman, T. Muravskaja, and L. Siib, “I Constantly Feel as if I Am Some Sort
of Michael Jackson,” Estonian Art 1/2 (2008): 21–26.
 42. K. Norman, “Poetic Investigations,” in After-War, ed. A. Trossek (Tallinn: Center for
Contemporary Arts, 2009), 13–39, 28.
 43. T. Muravskaja, “Artist Portofolio,” n.d., http://www.tanjamuravskaja.com/TanjaMuravskaja_
Portfoolio_2.pdf (accessed 21 June 2020).
  44. Tallinn Airport, “V aeroportu otkrylas’ vystavka Kaupo Kikkasa “Istoriia Sotni, [“The Story of
One Hundred”: Kaupo Kikkas exhibition opened at the airport]” 2018, https://www.tallinn-airport.ee/ru/
novosti/v-aeroportu-otkrylas-fotovystavka-kaupo-kikkasa-istoriya-sotni/ (accessed 21 June 2020).
 45. I. Hübscher, “Estonia through 100 pairs of eyes: The Idea to Create a Photography Project
Bringing Together Different Estonians,” 2018, https://estonia.ee/estonia-through-100-pairs-of-eyes/
(accessed 21 June 2020).
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Occupations,” 2017, https://www.cultures-of-history.uni-jena.de/debates/estonia/debating-vabamuchanging-names-and-narratives-at-estonias-museum-of-occupations/
(accessed 21 June 2020).
 47. H. Pääbo and E.-C. Pettai, “A Museum of Memories: The New ‘Vabamu’ in Tallinn,” 2019,
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(accessed 21 June 2020).
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of National Dignity and Drama of the Bronze Soldier,” Journal of Baltic Studies 39 (2008): 413.
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Relationship,” Journal of Baltic Studies 41 (2010): 286.
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(2009): 529.
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Monuments’ from Another Angle,” Europe-Asia Studies 59 (2007): 915.
 53. M. Mälksoo, “Liminality and Contested Europeanness: Conflicting Memory Politics in the
Baltic Space,” in Identity and Foreign Policy: Baltic-Russian Relations and European Integration, ed. E.
Berg and P. Ehin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 65–83, 69.
  54. D. Youngblood, “A War Remembered: Soviet Films of the Great Patriotic War,” The American
Historical Review 106 (2015): 844.
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European Research, April 1991, https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1991-804-07-Tumarkin.pdf (accessed
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  56. Y. Mann, “(Re)Cycling the Collective Memory of the Great Patriotic War,” The Journal of Slavic
Military Studies 33 (2020): 511, 512.
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of Military Glory,’” in War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, ed. J. Fedor, M. Kangaspuro, J.
Lassila, and T. Zhurzhenko (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 399–427, 406.
1174  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
 58. J. Fedor, “Memory, Kinship, and the Mobilization of the Dead: The Russian State and the
‘Immortal Regiment’ Movement,” in War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, ed. J. Fedor, M.
Kangaspuro, J. Lassila, and T. Zhurzhenko (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 307–45, 311.
  59. Mann, “(Re)Cycling the Collective Memory of the Great Patriotic War,” 512.
 60. ÚV Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy [Central Committee of the Communist Party of
Bohemia and Moravia], “Minulost nesmí být zapomenuta, [History may not be forgotten]” 2019, https://
www.kscm.cz/cs/aktualne/stanoviska/minulost-nesmi-byt-zapomenuta (accessed 21 June 2020).
 61. iDNES, “Řeporyje mají památník vlasovcům, doplňuje ho ruský tank s německou přilbou,
[Řeporyje has a monument to the Vlasov soldiers, adorned by a Russian tank with a German helmet]”
2020, https://www.idnes.cz/praha/zpravy/pomnik-vlasovci-diplomacie-reporyje-novotny-rusko.
A200501_090455_praha-zpravy_zdo (accessed 21 June 2020).
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(accessed 21 June 2020).
 63. 1tv.ru, “V Chekhii predlozhili ustanovit pamiatnik ‘vlasovtsam’ na meste monumenta marshalu
Konevu, [In the Czech Republic they want to install a monument to the Vlasov soldiers instead of the
monument to Marshal Konev]” 2019, https://www.1tv.ru/news/2019-11-26/376384-v_chehii_predlozhili_ustanovit_pamyatnik_vlasovtsam_na_meste_monumenta_marshalu_konevu
(accessed 21 June
2020).
  64. For an example see the piece that was published by the Russian outlet Vzgliad. S. Gur’ianov. “V
Prage sobralis’ postavit’ pamiatnik Vlasovu vmesto monumenta v chest’ Koneva, [In Prague they are
planning to install a monument to Vlasov instead of the monument honoring Konev]” https://vz.ru/
news/2019/11/24/1010045.html (accessed 21 June 2020).
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State,” International Organization 49 (1995): 689–72.
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Security Dialogue 46 (2015): 221–37.
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(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
  68. K. Nagaev, “Posla Rossii vyzvali v MID Chehii iz-za slov Medinskogo, [Russian ambassador
summoned to the Czech MFA because of Medinsky’s words]” 2019, https://www.rbc.ru/politics/13/09/2
019/5d7b9c139a7947331b0c7095 (accessed 21 June 2020).
  69. Kommersant, “Shoigu poprosil Minoborony Chekhii peredat’ RF pamiatnik marshalu Konevu,
[Shoigu asked the Czech Ministry of Defense to hand over the Konev monument to the Russian
Federation]” 2020, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4318060 (accessed 21 June 2020).
 70. P. Himshiashvili, A. Atasuntsev, and V. Poliakova, “Lavrov nazval detskimi i stydlivymi
ob’’iasneniia Chehii o pamiatnike Konevu, [Lavrov says the Czech explanations on the Konev statue are
“childish” and “shy”]” RBC, 15 May 2020, https://www.rbc.ru/politics/15/05/2020/5ebe65dc9a7947885
11b3834 (accessed 21 June 2020).
 71. Sledstvennyi Komitet, “Vozbuzhdeno ugolovnoe delo o snose pamiatnika Marshalu Konevu v
Prage, [Investigative Committee of Russia, “Criminal investigation opened following the demolition of the
Marshal Konev statue in Prague]” 2020, https://sledcom.ru/news/item/1454798/ (accessed 21 June 2020).
 72. Velvyslanectví České Republiky v Moskvě, “Prohlášení MZV k vyjádřením Ruské federace,
[The Embassy of the Czech Republic to Moscow, “Declaration of the Foreign Ministry concerning the
statements of the Russian Federation”]” 2020, https://www.mzv.cz/moscow/cz/vzajemne_vztahy/
prohlaseni_mzv_k_vyjadrenim_ruske.html (accessed 21 June 2020).
 73. Česká Televize, “Starosta Prahy 6 Kolář se kvůli výhrůžkám skrývá na neznámém místě.
Ochranu mají i Novotný a Hřib, [Czech Television, “Prague 6 mayor Kolař in hiding due to threats.
Novotny and Hřib also under police protection]” 2020, https://ct24.ceskatelevize.cz/domaci/3085706starosta-prahy-6-kolar-se-kvuli-vyhruzkam-skryva-na-neznamem-miste-ochranu-maji-i
(accessed 21
June 2020).
Kazharski and Makarychev /From the Bronze Soldier to the “Bloody “Marshal”  1175
 74. A. Jordanová, “Kdyby Koněv tehdy nepřijel. . . Čeští aktéři, ruská media, [If Konev hadn’t
come. . . Czech actors, Russian media.]” https://www.stopfake.org/cz/kdyby-konev-tehdy-neprijel-cestiakteri-ruska-media/
(accessed 21 June 2020).
 75. M. Švehla, “Maršál z Dejvic, [The Marshal from Dejvice]” 2018, https://www.respekt.cz/
tydenik/2018/2/marsal-z-dejvic (accessed 21 June 2020).
 76. Aktuálne, “U sochy maršála Koněva odhalili vysvětlující desky. Přepisujete historii, protestovali komunisté,
[Explanatory signs unveiled on Marshal Konev’s statue. You are rewriting history, the Com|
munists protest.]” 2018, https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/u-sochy-marsala-koneva-odhalili-vysvetlujicidesky-prepisuje/r~6408ca48a55011e8b634ac1f6b220ee8/
(accessed 21 June 2020).
 77. Aktuálne, “U sochy maršála Koněva odhalili vysvětlující desky. Přepisujete historii, protestovali
komunisté, [Explanatory signs unveiled on Marshal Konev’s statue. You are rewriting history, the Communists
protest.]” 2018, https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/u-sochy-marsala-koneva-odhalili-vysvetlujicidesky-prepisuje/r~6408ca48a55011e8b634ac1f6b220ee8/
(accessed 21 June 2020).
 78. N. Krzyżanowska, “The Discourse of Counter-Monuments: Semiotics of Material
Commemoration in Contemporary Urban Spaces,” Social Semiotics 26 (2016): 465–85.
 79. iDNES, “Řeporyje mají památník vlasovcům, doplňuje ho ruský tank s německou přilbou,
[Řeporyje has a monument to the Vlasov soldiers, adorned by a Russian tank with a German helmet]”
2020, https://www.idnes.cz/praha/zpravy/pomnik-vlasovci-diplomacie-reporyje-novotny-rusko.A20
0501_090455_praha-zpravy_zdo (accessed 21 June 2020).
  80. The English text is quoted according to the authorized abridged translation. A. Solzhenitsyn, The
Gulag Archipelago (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), 105.
 81. S. Nørholm and K. M. Berg, “Entropa: Rhetoric of Parody and Provocation,” in Let’s Talk
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Mieroop, and B. Gorp (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014), 131–47.
 82. P. Petro, “Hašek, Voinovich, and the Tradition of Anti-Militarist Satire,” Canadian Slavonic
Papers 22 (1980): 116–21.
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in the Czech Republic, “Comments of the Embassy of Russia in the Czech Republic”]” 2020, https://
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Vladimir Putin,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49 (2016): 47.
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1176  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
 95. C. Wagnsson, and M. Hellman, “Normative Power Europe Caving in? EU under Pressure of
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Aliaksei Kazharski completed his PhD at Comenius University in Bratislava in 2015, and has worked
as a researcher and lecturer at Charles University in Prague. He is the author of Eurasian Integration and
the Russian World: Regionalism as an Identitary Enterprise (CEUPress, 2019).
Andrey Makarychev is Professor of Regional Political Studies of the Johan Skytte Institute of Political
Science, University of Tartu. His recent book co-authored with Alexandra Yatsyk is entitled The Critical
Biopolitics of the post-Soviet: from Populations to Nations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).