I wrote last week about plans to remove a replica Soviet tank that has stood (since the 1970s) just outside the eastern Estonian city of Narva. It marked the spot where the Red Army crossed the Narva River in 1944 during the course of the brutal fighting that destroyed what had once been one of northern Europe’s most beautiful cities.
Estonia has removed a Soviet tank memorial from a town close to the Russian border as its prime minister pledged to clear all such monuments from public spaces in the Baltic country.
Prime minister Kaja Kallas said on Tuesday that since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February tensions over Soviet-era monuments had increased and that moving them was necessary to stop Russia “tearing open old wounds”.
She added: “No one wants to see our militant and hostile neighbour foment tensions in our home . . . Considering the speed of the increasing tensions and confusion around memorials in Narva, we must act quickly to ensure public order and internal security.”
Livestreamed video from the town showed the Estonian army removing a second world war T-34 Soviet tank from its plinth using cables and a crane. It was then loaded on to a truck to be taken to the Estonian War Museum close to the capital, Tallinn.
What Kallas is getting at with those remarks is that Soviet monuments in Estonia (it’s equally true of those in other Baltic states), which were, for the most part, erected as monuments to Soviet power rather than Soviet mourning, have the potential to take on a second life as focal points for discontent among the Russian speaking minorities who are mainly either (primarily Russian) settlers who arrived during the second Soviet occupation (1944-91) or their descendants. This is why “recontextualizing” the monuments doesn’t work.
When discussing the fate of the giant Soviet “Victory Monument” complex in Riga (which is also set to be demolished: I wrote about that here), Latvia’s president referred specifically to this issue, as I explained in the course of this passage:
For many Russian-speakers, the complex had become not only a focal point for commemorations of wartime victory (attendance could run into six figures), but a place that was theirs, an assertion of their continuing presence in Latvia and, with it, a vision of modern Latvia, whether colonial, post-colonial, or a fusion of both, that ethnic Latvians do not share and never will. It’s telling that the Latvian president’s arguments for removing the monument concern the future as well as the past.
The meaning of a monument can evolve over time. The functions filled by the object Levits labels a “Kremlin propaganda facility” now include, he maintains, acting as a public display of support for the notion of a “Russian world.” This “world,” a concept promoted by Putin and condemned, reasonably enough, by Levits as “imperialist,” rests upon the idea of a murkily defined Russian “space” even larger than Russia itself. Within it, the argument runs, Moscow may have the right to assist, one way or another, threatened “compatriots” beyond its borders, such as the Baltics’ supposedly bullied Russian-speakers. The implications of that are not hard to work out.
Such issues are particularly dangerous in Narva, a city (Estonia’s third largest) only separated from Russia by a narrow river, and where an overwhelming majority of the population is Russian speaking. Many hold Russian citizenship. A potential focal point for trouble — which could be exploited by Russia — is the last thing that the Estonian government wants to see. It’s worth remembering that just two months ago, Vladimir Putin specifically referred to Narva as being a part of historically Russian lands. Trolling? Probably, but there’s generally a point to Putin’s trolling and, for that matter, to his historical “research.”
I’d expected that the tank would be transferred within Narva — to the grounds of the city’s (magnificent) castle, perhaps, which is where Estonia’s last Lenin — other than those dumped with other such monsters outside a museum — still lurks. But, by transferring the tank to a museum just outside Tallinn, the Estonian government has clearly decided to take no chances. As the FT notes, there were major disturbances in Tallinn (the Estonian capital) when the “bronze soldier,” a Soviet memorial in the form of a (comparatively modest) statue of a Red Army soldier that had stood in a central part of the city, was moved to the city’s military cemetery in 2007. “Alyosha” is still there today, presiding over respectfully treated Soviet graves.
Speaking the other day, Estonia’s president, Alar Karis, had this to say (via the Baltic Times):
According to the president, he thought a while ago that it would be enough to add a plaque explaining the history to the tank, but this is no longer enough. “The place of a World War II tank is not on a pedestal by the road connecting Narva and Narva-Joesuu, but in a museum. In the museum, the tank would become a part of history again, would not let us quarrel in the present…
Wise words.