Six weeks ago, I wrote about plans to demolish what is now known as the Victory Monument, a massive, triumphalist excrescence that wrecks what would otherwise be a pleasant park in the Latvian capital, Riga. It was originally constructed in the 1980s to commemorate the Red Army’s “liberation” of Latvia toward the end of the Second World War, a liberation that, in the view of most ethnic Latvians, would have been improved had the Red Army had not stayed on — for nearly half a century.
As I noted:
Like neighboring Estonia and Lithuania, Latvia had been forcibly incorporated into the USSR in 1940, part of the spoils of Stalin’s pact with Hitler. When the Germans invaded their erstwhile Soviet accomplices in 1941, they overran and then occupied the Baltic states, until, in due course, the Red Army drove them out. That returned the trio to Moscow’s grim “union” for a second, far more prolonged taste of what that meant, including, notoriously, the killings, jailings, terms in the Gulag, and mass deportations that characterized the early phases of a reoccupation that lasted nearly a half century and, in Latvia’s case, ended with ethnic Latvians only just remaining the majority in their own country. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that they want to be rid of a complex (the monument consists of an obelisk and a series of statues) built to celebrate the opening act of a fresh national catastrophe.
Plans to demolish the monument (no easy task: It’s vast) continue.
Rīga City Council has designated a builder for the demolition of the Soviet monument, but the company’s name will not be disclosed for the time being.
Rīga City Executive Director Jānis Lange said that it would be impossible to dismantle the monument by breaking down the steps from top to bottom as it would take too long. Given that the builder must also dismantle the bronze statues and pool adjacent to the monument, and then perform the site development work, the demolition of the monument has to be quick.
At the end of my article, I argued that the demolitions would not stop there:
[T]he Baltic monument wars will continue elsewhere, just one front in the long-standing effort to define the identities of these lands by changing how the past is reflected in their landscape. After the Baltic states were annexed, the Soviets destroyed, with a couple of unlikely exceptions, almost anything honoring the republics’ inter-war independence. Many of these have now been rebuilt, and many of their Soviet successors have been torn down. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means that the pace of clearing away the remnants will pick up. . . .
The [Estonian] government has agreed communist monuments in public spaces, including the T-34 tank in Narva, will be moved as soon as possible, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas (Reform) said on Wednesday. . . .
There are estimated to be between 200 and 400 Soviet monuments across Estonia.
“A separate issue is the Narva tank, which has been talked about a lot. Currently, this tank belongs to the City of Narva, and in the current legal space it has been difficult. But since it is clear that Narva is not doing it itself, tensions are rising there, it is clear that the Estonian state and government must make the decision themselves to move this and other monuments with symbolic value,” said Kallas.
“It is important to [emphasize] that commemorating the dead is not prohibited in any way and will not be prohibited, but that it should be done in the right place and that is at a cemetery, where it can be done with dignity,” said Kallas.
A visit to the military cemetery in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, quickly reveals that the Soviet dead are indeed treated with dignity.
The tank in question (a replica of a Soviet T-34) is a Soviet war memorial in Narva, the easternmost city in Estonia, which is separated from Russia by a not particularly wide river (I wrote about a visit there for the New Criterion a few years back), and, following some threatening remarks by Vladimir Putin in June, discussed the city in a Corner post here.
The tank stands at the spot where the Red Army crossed the Narva River in the course of brutal fighting in and around the city in 1944. By the end of it, Narva, formerly one of Northern Europe’s more beautiful small cities, had been destroyed. It was rebuilt in Soviet style and, with formerly independent Estonia now forcibly incorporated into the USSR, was repopulated by settlers, mainly Russian, from elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The surviving Estonians who had lived in Narva before the war were not allowed to return. The city today is overwhelmingly Russian speaking.
Aliide Naylor, the author of a book about the Baltics, which I reviewed for NR here, has been in Narva recently, and has written a useful update on the debate surrounding the tank here.
It now appears that the tank will be removed sooner rather than later, and will probably end up in a museum in the city. This is an approach similar to that taken with the large statue of Lenin, which used to stand in the city’s main square, but which was later tucked away in a quiet corner within Narva’s impressive Hermann castle where, so far as I know, the old murderer still stands.