Related Papers
Appropriating Stalinist heritage: state rhetoric and urban transformation in the repurposing of VDNKh
2020 •
Andreas Schonle
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies
Monumental Landscapes and the Politics of Place: The First Lenin to Fall
2018 •
Kateryna Malaia
On August 1, 1990, there was an unprecedented event in the Ukrainian town of Chervonohrad: a crowd gathered at the central square and, for the first time in the USSR, demolished a monument to Lenin. The demolition caused a political scandal and was the first of a chain of Lenin statue topplings all over Soviet Ukraine and beyond. Chervonohrad’s deconstruction is often compared to the array of Lenin statue demolitions that took place during the 2013-14 Ukrainian Revolution. Yet, this historic comparison does not answer the question: why was Chervonohrad, out of all the Soviet political centres and peripheral towns, meant to go down in history in this monumental way?Although the transformation of monumental landscapes has been among the most studied aspects of the post-Soviet condition, it has often been approached unilaterally. The studies of dismantled monuments have explored the largest scale of national and international politics, national imageries, and historic myth. The overwhe...
Pluralist Memories and Dissonant Heritages: The Soviet Architectural Legacy in Putin's Russia, Translated from French, Le Mouvement Social, 260, Juillet-Septembre 2017, p. 1-25
Julie Deschepper
Heritage Activism in Cities of Eastern Europe and Russia from 1968 to the Current-Program
Eszter Gantner
From the works of Walter Benjamin to writings of Andreas Huyssen, cities have been recognized in their role as depositories of history and memory. Different cities performed differently in this role, of course. Issues of ‘truth’ and ‘distortion’, ‘silencing’ and ‘forgetting’ were at the forefront of public discussions during the period of 1990s’ transitions in Eastern Europe and Russia (Czaplicka, Gelazis and Ruble, 2009). As capitalist economies took root and the ‘heritage industry’ expanded, political uses of the past gave way to its commercial exploitation (Labadi & Logan, 2015; Samutina and Stepanov, 2014). Quarter-of-a-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism and its legacy are no longer debated in terms of either ‘truth’ or ‘lie’ but urban ‘atmospherics’: structures of feelings, which are spatially generated but temporally significant. Artists are often the chosen agents of these creations who put their creative practices toward the reinscription of meaning and alternative activation of urban spaces (Goebel 2015). Our is to examine and extend the existing knowledge about the political potential of heritage in the context of the post/socialist city, in the past and present. How can urban heritage and its making in the context of the city politicize, mobilize and produce opposition, including one expressed artistically? We understand ‘heritage-making’ as an open-ended process by which urban built environment is positioned as valuable and socially and culturally significant for a group or a community across generations. The focus of the workshop, therefore, is on the tangible form primarily, or its mediated representations (as, for instance, in the case of digital reproductions). By ‘protest’ we mean practices subversive of the established political order, urban civic initiatives or outright protests. What unites these categories of action is the ethos of change, however implicit or ineffective from the point of view of achieving it. History has taught us that under authoritarian regimes, it is often the artistic practices, including performance, that carried the political weight and expressed discontent — a role that may be relevant again for arts and artists in the current political climate of Eastern Europe and Russia. As this might be the case, trajectories of performative traditions of non-conformist art of the social period, and their possible influence on the current subversive practices form our special point of interest.
Monuments and Museums in Post-Soviet Moscow
2017 •
Thijs Korsten
IKON. Journal of Iconographic Studies
Lenin resurrected. Destruction and Return of the Lenin Statue of Berlin's Platz der Vereinten Nationen (Leninplatz)
2018 •
Svea Janzen
Public Sculpture in Moscow as Monument and Site of Protest
Evgenia Abramova
Moscow; An Urban Pendulum Swinging Between The Glorification of the Proletariat And The Celebration Of Absolutist Power Under the Changing Winds of Globalization
murat cetin
The Reconstructed City as Rhetorical Space: The Case of Volgograd
Elena Trubina
The key idea of recent collective, cultural, and personal memory studies is that memory can no longer be seen as reflection, as a transparent record of the past, but should be understood as essentially performative. Not only it is never morally or pragmatically neutral, but it can come into existence at a given time and place through specific kinds of memory work. In this presentation, I consider how in the city of Volgograd the built structure and the national traditions of mourning come into ambiguous interplay when seen from different points of view: that of the various generations of its inhabitants and visitors; that of the planners and developers who reconstructed it after the war; and that of war memorials whose symbolic role and function have changed over time. Drawing on the theories of phenomenologist Edward S. Casey on remembering and commemoration, these of philosopher Avishai Margalit on ethics of memory, and on Lorraine Code's work with rhetorical space, I’ll show that Volgograd, while being an impressive example of socialist tradition in modernist planning, becomes for many the repository of “Soviet” memories both by virtue of its urban structure and the traumas of the World War II. It is especially obvious in the everyday rituals through which memory work has been performed in Volgograd, a site sacred in Russian memory, and their reception by diverse audiences. In particular, I focus on the honor guard ceremony daily held by the Eternal Fire memorial and on the rhetoric of excursion around the city. The proliferating research on the memory of the II World War centers, understandably, on how different sorts of cultural representations contributed to sustaining patriotic feelings during and after the period, in creating a national identity. What interests me though is the activities of the unknown (and young) cultural practitioners, its social dynamics and political repercussions. The girls-teenagers taking part in the honor guard ceremony make an observer to think about the implicit significance of gender relations for the construction of history and cultural memory. The young excursion-guide who readily reproduces in her speech all the rhetorical devices and the dominant narrative of the Soviet times, enthusiastically reproaching those in the group who dare the express their doubts with regard to her words on the pretext on “insufficient respect towards the memory of soldiers” makes one think of the difficulties of producing rhetorical means better suited to the present day audiences’ needs and tastes than those worked out in the Soviet times.
Farewell Lenin - Good Bye Nikolai: Two Attitudes towards Soviet Heritage in Former East Berlin
Matteo Bertelé
