I posted something last night about the decision to put up a Soviet era statue to Friedrich Engels in Manchester. The statue was first unveiled as part of a live film event called Ceremony.
Friedrich Engels — philosopher, writer, radical thinker — is coming back home. Turner Prize-nominated artist Phil Collins is returning Engels to the city where he made his name — in the form of a Soviet-era statue, driven across Europe and permanently installed in the centre of Manchester. Ceremony will be a singular moment in the city’s history. Performers, musicians and the people of Manchester will create an extraordinary live film to bring MIF17 to a close, mixing footage from the statue’s journey with live coverage of its inauguration.
Now there’s been a comment in the Guardian about the statue. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s an extract (my emphasis added):
My wife is third-generation British Ukrainian. Her grandparents were captured by the Germans and worked in forced labour in Germany during the second world war. After the war, they were sent to a displaced persons camp in England and they eventually settled in Cheetham Hill, north Manchester. The city has one of the largest Ukrainian communities in Britain. It has a social club, church, school, youth organisations, dance groups, choirs and museum. The members of this community epitomise everything that is great about Manchester – intelligent, hardworking, cynical, creative and good-humoured.
Communism was a very real thing for British Ukrainians from the 1950s to 1990s. Many had relatives on the wrong side of the iron curtain. Others had lost family in the Holodomor [the genocidal famine in Ukraine organized by the Stalin regime]. Millions of Ukrainians lost their lives to the Soviet regime. Anti-Soviet protests in Manchester or London were a common part of diaspora life. You could argue they are also part of the “Manchester radical” narrative. The aftermath of the Soviet era still affects Ukraine and its diaspora today.
I have grown to love the Manchester Ukrainian community. We were married in the Ukrainian church and our daughter was baptised there. I have visited Ukraine on two occasions. I respect the traditions and culture of the Manchester diaspora. Like any community, they are not always perfect, but they are proudly Mancunian and deserve to be listened to.
I understand that art should be challenging, but for me the statue and Ceremony glorify communism. I feel uncomfortable that the statue was part of the Soviet propaganda machine – even if it originates from the “softer” Brezhnev regime (the statue was created in 1970). The placards promoting communism that have been placed around the statue do not help….
When I saw the statue in person I was drawn to the faded blue-and-yellow paint of the Ukrainian flag on the legs. I assume that it was painted by Ukrainians following the fall of the Soviet regime in 1991. A part of me longed to repaint the statue in the Ukrainian colours.
Do I have a problem with a statue of Engels in Manchester? No. There is already a sculpture of his beard in Salford. He is an important figure in Manchester’s history. But I do have a problem with a statue created specifically to promote Soviet propaganda being placed in Manchester – if, as a result, it romanticises communism and totalitarianism.
The Manchester International Festival is brilliant for the region, but it is a shame neither the festival nor the artist engaged properly with the city’s Ukrainian community beforehand. I understand that members of the community were approached about providing a choir for Ceremony, but they turned it down when they discovered the context.
The last sentence says it all.
Update
Over the weekend, the Financial Times ran a piece by John Lloyd on the saga of this statue’s journey to Manchester.
Two extracts (my emphasis added):
More than most contemporary artists on the left, Collins shows a strong sympathy for the communist era: one of his films, Marxism Today, is composed of tender interviews with former teachers of Marxism-Leninism in East Germany who were rendered unemployable by its collapse. “When the wall fell, there was also a collapse of something which had been solidarity, co-operative working: individualism flourished,” he says.
Ah yes, individualism. East Germany was famous for that.
Lloyd concluded:
For all the mass murders committed in their name, Marx and Engels continue to loom large today, not just in the consciousness of lachrymose visitors from China — where they remain on their pedestals. Their ideas are being revived beyond the lecture room. They represent a way not taken, a revolution betrayed. And on Sunday evening, Manchester’s first communist will be unveiled on a capitalist pedestal at last.
“A way not taken, a revolution betrayed,” words that encapsulate one of the more persistent myths about the communist experience: Lenin betrayed Marx and Engels, Stalin betrayed Lenin. Not so much. Lenin certainly applied his own gloss to Marx (and by extension) Engels. There’s a reason people talk of Marxism-Leninism. And Stalin applied his gloss to Lenin. But they were all building on the same base, and headed in (more or less) the same direction.
Marx:
There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.