War Memorials and the Politics of Memory: the Soviet War Memorial in Tallinn

During the interwar years, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil brazenly wrote that, “monuments are so conspicuously inconspicuous. There is nothing so invisible as a monument.”1 Musil is partially correct – monuments all too easily fade into the landscape and are visible for either tourists looking for signs of historical interest or as meeting places for local residents. But what happens when a monument which was once asleep suddenly comes to life and is made painfully visible? Such was the case of the Bronze Soldier war memorial built in Soviet Estonia (1947) to commemorate the liberation of Tallinn by the Red Army. Nicknamed the “Bronze Soldier” by Estonians and “Aljosa” by Russians, the Soviet monument stood in the city center amidst apartment buildings, the National Library and a trolley stop. The handsome and melancholic statue suddenly came to life in 2005 sparking heated debates between Estonians and their Russian-speaking minority and in between Estonia and the Federation of Russia. In many ways, the riots surrounding the controversial relocation of the monument to a military cemetery on the outskirts of Tallinn by the Estonian center-right government in April 2007 fulfilled Marx’s prophecy that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past. The tradition of all the generations of the dead weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”2 How a statue representing an Estonian soldier in a Red Army uniform became a heroic cult for the Russian community in Estonia and Putin’s government demonstrates the enormous power of cultural symbols. The clashing interpretations of liberation versus occupation, victory versus trauma, attest to the fault lines in the East European memory landscape. In a resurgent Russia, the Great Patriotic War is an event of mythical importance separated from communism. For Estonians, however, monuments to that same war are deeply linked to the historical experience of Soviet occupation, deportation and loss of national independence. Two different understandings of the recent past are represented visually in the same war memorial. The conflict over the Bronze Soldier and the riots surrounding its relocation demonstrates that monuments are founded on a paradox. As places of memory, they are supposed to symbolize events from the past for future generations. As works of art, they are supposed to make time stand still. However, since time marches on and societies change, the attempt to freeze time visually into space is fraught with difficulty. War memorials are cultural symbols reflecting the human instinct for aggression towards one another. While they may have many different interpretations, all war memorials are attempts to make sense of the senseless: violent death at the hands of others. Death is not commemorated due to natural catastrophe or illness, but due to war. Drawing on the insights of Reinhart Koselleck and George Mosse, war memorials are visual representations of modernity linked to the development of the modern nation-state. Divided roughly into three time periods, memorials built before World War I tend to commemorate heroic leaders who died in the name of the nation. After World War I, the democraticization of the modern