Monumental Voids and the Urban Political Common Space: United States and Post-Soviet Eurasia Kateryna Malaia, Mississippi State University
I will start this essay with my central thesis:
The practice of taking down monuments is a physical manifestation of city dwellers’ attempts to gain political power they are otherwise deprived of by the larger unit of the state.
From here I will introspect to several seemingly remote cases of urban disobedience. Under a close scrutiny these cases have fundamental communalities not only in their physical manifestations—monument removal—but in the political hierarchies and power dynamics that conditioned them. All the monument demolitions described in this paper took place amid tumultuous times and political upheavals larger than the unit of the city and often larger than the unit of the state. The purpose of this text is not to analyze these dramatic political moments but only to speak to the special act of monument demolition in these larger than life contexts. This paper examines monument removal cases starting from the recent protests against police brutality triggered by the murder of George Floyd in the United States, to the anti-communist, anti-corruption, and anti-central government demolitions in the Soviet and post-Soviet cities. These cases are used to pinpoint the small-scale local mechanisms of urban self-determination that lead to the removal of monuments and crystallization of their monumental voids. The world in the twenty-first century continues to become more urban: the United Nations estimated that more than half the world’s population lives in cities.1 One would assume that by now, with over a century of rapid urbanization behind us, cities would have also gained political control over the rest of the larger political units around them. They have indeed developed some influence; yet, surprisingly, even in the most decentralized states, cities are still politically in the hands of authorities outside of the urban sphere and scope. The political underprivilege of cities in the face of the state is a phenomenon so common that it allows for comparing contexts as seemingly different as the Soviet, post-Soviet, and American monument demolitions.
Birmingham, Alabama, United States: Upheaval On May 31, 2020, Randall Woodfin, the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama’s biggest city, walked into the crowd of protesters attempting to take down the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors 1 UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision, ST/ESA/SER.A/420, xix (2019), https://population.un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-Report.pdf.
Monument in the city’s Linn Park. In a later interview, he recalled first warning the protesters of the dangers of taking it down—people getting arrested or hurt—and then asking the crowd to give him two days to take it down with heavy equipment.2 The New York Times described the event as follows: The statue has been at the center of a legal fight between the city and the state’s attorney general’s office, with the city wanting it removed but ultimately losing the battle. Still, Randall Woodfin, the mayor of the majority black city, approved the removal on Monday in defiance of the Alabama Monuments Preservation Act, setting the stage for another showdown.3 The day after the monument removal, the attorney general of the state of Alabama filed a lawsuit against the city of Birmingham for violating state regulations on monument removal. The city was ordered to pay a $25,000 fine, which was quickly covered with the money raised in an online fundraiser organized by local Birmingham clergy.4 Although this monument removal took place at the peak of nationwide protests, it was not an isolated occurrence solely related to the recent crisis. In 2015, Birmingham Park and Recreation Board asked the city attorneys to research possibilities to remove this Confederate monument.5 Two years later, in 2017, the Alabama governor signed a law prohibiting local governments from tampering with monuments.6 The same year, the Birmingham mayor ordered the monument covered first with plastic, then with plywood.7 This exchange between the city and the state would have continued if the mayor had not ordered direct action: “By about 8 p.m. Monday, heavy equipment arrived at the park, including a crane, a forklift and a flatbed trailer.”8 The statue was removed and taken to an undisclosed location [Fig. 1]. The conflict seems peculiar: it is no longer simply the protestors against the politicians and power structures. The highest-ranking urban politician—the mayor—joined the protesters and then promised and fulfilled his promise to meet their demands practically on the spot. On the contrary, the larger political unit of the state announced and delivered repercussions, which were 2 Alex Morris, “An Interview from Birmingham City Hall: Mayor Randall Woodfin on Toppling Racist Monuments,” Rolling Stone, July 9, 2020, accessed October 8, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politicsfeatures/birmingham-alabama-mayor-randall-woodfin-confederate-statues-racism-1026205/. 3 Audra D. S. Burch, “Birmingham Mayor Orders Removal of Confederate Monument in Public Park,” New York Times, June 2, 2020, accessed October 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/george-floyd-birminghamconfederate-statue.html. 4 Greg Garrison, “White Clergy for Black Lives Matter Raise $50,000 for Monument Removal,” AL.com, June 2, 2020, accessed October 8, 2020, https://www.al.com/news/2020/06/white-clergy-for-black-lives-matter-raise-50000for-monument-removal.html. 5 Joseph D. Bryant, “Birmingham City Officials Take Steps to Remove Confederate Monument at Linn Park,” AL.com, July 1, 2015, Accessed October 10, 2020, https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2015/07/finding_another_place_birmingh.html. 6Mike Cason, “Gov. Kay Ivey Signs Bill Protecting Confederate Monuments,” AL.com, May 25, 2017, https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2017/05/gov_kay_ivey_signs_bill_protec.html. 7 Erin Edgemon, “Birmingham Covers Confederate Monument as City Considers Removal,” AL.com, August 15, 2017, accessed October 8, 2020, https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2017/08/defy_state_law_and_remove_conf.html. 8 Burch, “Birmingham Mayor Orders Removal of Confederate Monument in Public Park.”
then compensated with a vigorous community effort. The power struggle lines are clearly drawn between the city and its state, or, alternatively, the state and its city.
Fig 1. The site of the removed Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, October 2020. The City and the State: A Distinction The world might be getting more urban by the moment, but political mechanisms still rarely privilege cities. Political dominance of the state has a long history in the United States, but is it still relevant? Graham quotes the jurist John Forrest Dillon, who in 1868 “declared that cities were entirely beholden to their state legislature: ‘It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so may it destroy. If it may destroy, it may abridge and control.’”9 In the current American context, the political power of states over cities has another dimension: that of the party lines and accompanying political and philosophical values. The two major political parties are frequently demonstrated with a convenient color trope: blue stands for the Democratic Party and red stands for the Republican Party. This color code emerged during the 9 David A. Graham, “Red State, Blue City,” The Atlantic, March 2017, accessed October 8, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/red-state-blue-city/513857/.
2000 presidential election to ease the understanding of election maps as shown on television. Since then, this color code has become a brand and a power tool in its own right. The American presidential election process, known as the Electoral College, is complex: each state has a predetermined number of electors who typically vote for the president according to the popular vote in their state.10 States that have consistently voted Democratic are regarded as blue states, while states that have consistently voted Republican are regarded as red states. Socalled swing states have not voted consistently and have the potential to vote either way. These states frequently become the main election battlefield for presidential candidates. At the same time, elections in recent years have clearly demonstrated that in many states that cast their votes for Republican (red) candidates, metropolitan areas cast their votes for Democrats (blue).11 With the radicalization of American politics in recent years, this divide appears more intense than ever. Political scientist Jonathan Rodden suggests that the American voting systems are to blame for this political divide: a majoritarian system rather than proportional popular vote benefits districts with lower population densities, hence everywhere other than cities.12 At the same time, in the countries that utilize a proportional system for presidential elections, the urban-state divide is still visible in the race outcomes. For instance, a recent post-Soviet presidential election in Ukraine in 2019 that used a proportional system resulted in a landslide victory—72.23% of the votes—for the presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, gave Zelenskiy a significantly lower 60% of the votes.13 The only Ukrainian region where Zelenskiy did not win, Lvivska Oblast, voted 52–65% for his opponent, Petro Poroshenko, while its capital city of Lviv voted for Poroshenko at the landslide rate of 69.7%, nearly symmetrically opposite to the country in general.14 In other words, it was not just the quantity of the votes that determined Zelenskiy’s victory or loss in certain regions but also their quality: the rural or urban belonging of the voters. The next historic case of a monument removal is a vivid illustration of this qualitative difference. Chervonohrad, Ukraine: The City Council In 1990, a crowd in a Western Ukrainian coal miners’ town, Chervonohrad, demolished the central monument to Vladimir Lenin in the still-solid Soviet Union. This event was outstanding 10 See “What is the Electoral College?” National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/about . 11 Damore, Lang, and Danielson provide the following example: the state of Utah is “regarded as one of the most Republican [red] in the nation,” while Salt Lake City—the capital city and the most populous metropolitan area in Utah—hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1974. David Damore, Robert Lang, and Karen Danielson, Blue Metros, Red States: The Shifting Urban-Rural Divide in America's Swing States (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2020), 2. 12 Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 3. 13 Iryna Shtohrin, “Za koho Kyiv ta iaki rehiony naibil’she pidtrymaly Volodymyra Zelens’koho,” Radio Svoboda, April 22, 2019, accessed on October 6, 2020, https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/29897231.html. 14 “U L’vovi opratsiuvaly 100% protokoliv: Poroshenko otrymav 70% pidtrymky (video),” UNIAN, April 22, 2019, accessed October 6, 2020, https://www.unian.ua/elections/10525692-u-lvovi-opracyuvali-100-protokoliv-poroshenko-otrimav-70-pidtrimkivideo.html.
to say the least—this was the first clearly documented Lenin monument demolition to take place in the USSR, a country that still closely followed Lenin’s ideology. Several years ago, I became so intrigued by the brief accounts of this demolition available in popular sources that I decided to investigate it in detail. In particular, I wanted to know why the first major demolition of a communist monument in the USSR took place in a peripheral small town rather than in any major or even regional political center with powerful dissident movements. When I dug into the media coverage of the events, read archival documents from the city and central government, and interviewed several eyewitnesses, the puzzle came together. In the late 1980s, within the scope of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ambitious perestroika plan, there were several important changes to the election process. In particular, for the first time in lateSoviet history, candidates in local elections were not fully determined by the central Communist Party organs but were also nominated by local organizations and electors at public meetings. This meant that at least peripheral towns and cities were able to go under the radar of the central authorities, particularly when they already had locally grown political figures and organizations. Chervonohrad happened to have a body of locally respected figures who were in-line enough with the Communist Party’s idea of a proper proletarian and could hence enter the election race. Those were the members of the Western Ukrainian coal miners’ union, who, despite their primarily economic demands, eagerly joined forces with the political movements in opposition to the Soviet government. As a result, the towns and cities that elected locally raised politicians instead of non-local, state-approved elites were able to develop enough autonomy to take down communist monuments in a shaken yet still deeply communist country.15 Kyiv, Ukraine: Protesters Not every Lenin monument demolition was like that of Chervonohrad. In 2014, the crowds in Kyiv took down the last monument to Lenin still standing in this capital city. This event was a goodbye to the communist past. But from a different perspective, it was also a performative act of the popular urban disagreement with the state-level politics. This case of Lenin monument removal was relatively straightforward: the crowds protested against the corrupt government, solid throughout different power levels from local administrations to the state. What is peculiar about the Kyiv case is that the monument to Lenin in the heart of the city, across the street from luxury stores and nightlife establishments, was not replaced. Six years later, the pedestal is completed with a temporary marker—a small metal structure in the form of the Ukrainian coat of arms [Fig. 2]. Yet the pedestal is not forgotten: over the years, there have been multiple conceptual competitions, both realized and unrealized, as well as guerilla installations placed over the former Lenin monument’s base. Even before the protests succeeded in banishing the disgraced president Viktor Yanukovych, in the days of the hardest clashes between the protesters and the police, a golden toilet—a representation of the baroque tastes and voracious appetites of the corrupt politicians—was installed on the former Lenin monument’s pedestal. The toilet that filled in the monumental void tied together two issues: the communist legacy and its 15 Kateryna Malaia, “Monumental Landscapes and the Politics of Place: The First Lenin to Fall,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 5, no. 1: 150–151, https://doi.org/10.21226/ewjus374.
relationship to post-communist oligarchies and corruption—which would otherwise appear unrelated to an unprepared observer.
Fig 2. A pedestal of the toppled monument to Lenin in Kyiv, Ukraine, September 2020. New Orleans, Louisiana, United States: The Mayor In his piece for the New Orleans newspaper The Times-Picayune, musician, educator, and public figure Wynton Marsalis wrote the following: He [Robert E. Lee] fought for the enslavement of a people against our national army fighting for their freedom; killed more Americans than any opposing general in history; made no attempt to defend or protect this city; and even more absurdly, he never even set
foot in Louisiana. In the heart of the most progressive and creative cultural city in America, why should we continue to commemorate this legacy?16 The irony of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee having nothing to do with the location of the monument itself is apparent. And although Marsalis speaks of the entire state of Louisiana, the major support for the monument removal came from Mayor Mitch Landrieu and the City Council of New Orleans, while the Republican-majority Louisiana State House of Representatives immediately issued a bill to protect Confederate monuments. Even the Democratic Louisiana governor, a representative of a political force opposed to the majority of the House of Representatives, did not veto this piece of legislation. In other words, Robert E. Lee and other Confederate statues did not appeal to the city of New Orleans’s elected legislators and executives but remained relevant or unproblematic for the state-level politicians. Portland, Oregon: The Elk The monument demolition in the city of Portland is perhaps the most pervasive argument in favor of this text’s thesis. Portland is a blue (Democratic) city in the blue state of Oregon. The recent 2020 protests resulted in massive clashes with local police. When federal law enforcement troops were sent into the city, the mayor joined the protesters and even got tear-gassed together with the crowd.17 Similarly, the governor of Oregon called for the federal forces to be removed from the city and the state.18 Several weeks prior to these highest officials siding with the crowd, protesters vandalized a statue of an elk that happened to be situated at one of the main locations for protests.19 The city then had to remove the statue to prevent its complete destruction [Fig. 3]. While the elk was not politically significant, the performative act of its attempted deconstruction and removal by the city was political and further invigorated political debates about the protests.20
16 Wynton Marsalis, “Why New Orleans Should Take Down Robert E. Lee's Statue: Wynton Marsalis,” The TimesPicayune, December 15, 2015, accessed October 6, 2020, https://www.nola.com/news/politics/article_8d83b0c9eb7e-5368-8180-65fa1e01d0a0.html. 17 Bill Chappell, “Portland's Mayor Is Tear-Gassed by Federal Forces on Another Night of Protests,” NPR, July 23, 2020, accessed October 8, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racialjustice/2020/07/23/894591409/portlands-mayor-is-tear-gassed-by-federal-forces-on-another-night-of-protests. 18 “Governor Kate Brown Announces Phased Withdrawal of Federal Law Enforcement from Portland,” State of Oregon Newsroom, July 29, 2020, accessed October 8, 2020, https://www.oregon.gov/newsroom/Pages/NewsDetail.aspx?newsid=37043. 19 Tess Riski, “City of Portland Will Remove Downtown Elk Statue after Protesters Burned It,” Willamette Weekly, July 2, 2020, accessed October 6, 2020, https://www.wweek.com/news/2020/07/02/city-of-portland-is-removing-elk-statue-after-protesters-burned-it/. 20 For example, see articles on the right-wing news platform Breitbart dedicated to Portland monument demolition. Bob Price, “Former Portland Democrat Congressional Candidate: We Brought Down Two Statues,” Breitbart, October 12, 2020, accessed October 19, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/law-and-order/2020/10/12/formerportland-democrat-congressional-candidate-we-brought-down-two-statues/
Fig. 3. The void in place of the Elk statue in Portland, Oregon, United States, October 2020. Urban Communality: Why Monuments? Whenever cities establish even a spark of political autonomy, they tend to misbehave like in Birmingham, Chervonohrad, Kyiv, or New Orleans. At least, urban attempts at self-governance are interpreted as misbehavior by the behemoth of the state and nationwide bureaucracies. And although comparisons between the United States and the Soviet and post-Soviet world are rarely well justified, when it comes to urban attempts at political self-determination, such comparison is not only possible but also necessary. The community of a nation-state is an imagined community, “as members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear from them.�21 The cities, while similar in the imagined communities of big numbers, possess a power of daily spatial experiences shared between all urbanites, even when the quality of these experiences varies significantly for different social groups. 22 The community of a city is a large community composed primarily of strangers. Nevertheless, those are not imaginary compatriots; those are strangers physically encountered on the street, in public transport, while performing daily tasks, and while using shared urban resources, such as parks, plazas, shopping, and entertainment venues. The universe of the city is not held together 21 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6. 22 M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 32.
through personal familiarity with one another’s opinions but through the shared cultural knowledge, code of conduct, and values. A city in itself is not unlike a little country: to hold it together, the residents of a city need to exist in the same cultural plain. However, unlike in a country, where the communality of experience is tied together through language and media,23 the communality of experience in a city is established through spaces and physical objects: streets and plazas, transit, parks, monuments, and landmarks. For an urbanite, a monument is not an abstraction. It is an active political player in the lived landscape. In Alexander Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman,” a St. Petersburg monument to Peter the Great comes to life and chases the protagonist, who, in the moment of madness, questions the autocratic brutality of this historic Russian tsar. Not unlike the Bronze Horseman statue, historic monuments out of tune with current narratives haunt cities by reminding urbanites of their limited power in the face of the state. Even amid some hopeful political transformations of the recent years, there are no signs that the monument demolitions will become irrelevant any time soon, as the dominance of a state over the city has yet to be questioned in a significant way. Gori, Georgia: Epilogue From the examples above, it may seem that urban desire for self-determination and political autonomy is always ethically in line with current day progressive values: democracy, anticolonialism, and anti-racism. This is, however, not always the case. Perhaps the most fascinating monument-centered case of urban resistance to state politics is found in the Georgian city of Gori. Gori is the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, the bloodiest of Soviet dictators, the figure popularly condemned practically everywhere in the world, except of some regime revivals.24 Until the 2000s, Gori was the site of one of the rare remaining monuments to Joseph Stalin. Unlike most Stalin monuments, it survived Khrushchev’s debunking of personality cult. The monument was removed in 2010 at night, with no announcement or public discussion and with no media coverage upon the orders of the Georgian central government.25 The secrecy, it seems, was meant to avoid potential protests due to a known positive sentiment toward Stalin in Gori. Kabachnik, Gugushvili, and Kirvalidze concluded their sociological study of popular opinions on the Stalin monument by stating that the controversy is not just about the historic Joseph Stalin himself: […] it points to concern about broader issues of heritage, conceptualizations of history and place, and the constant tensions between the state and its citizens in the context of frustrated democratic aspirations within a difficult post-Soviet transition.26 In 2013, the local Gori municipality sought approval to restore the statue and install it in the Joseph Stalin Museum nearby. At first, the restoration was approved by the Georgian Ministry of 23 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 136. 24 Emil Pain, “The Political Regime in Russia in the 2000s: Special Features, Inherited and Acquired,” Russian Politics and Law 49, no. 3 (May–June 2011): 15, https://doi.org/10.2753/RUP1061-1940490301. 25 Peter Kabachnik, Alexi Gugushvili, “Unconditional Love? Exploring Hometown Effect in Stalin's Birthplace,” Caucasus Survey 3, 2 (2015):101–123, 264, https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2015.1044305. 26 Peter Kabachnik, Alexi Gugushvili, and Ana Kirvalidze, “What about the Monument? Public Opinion and Contentious Politics in Stalin’s Homeland,” Problems of Post-Communism, 67:3 (2020), 274.
Culture, only to get condemned by then-President Mikheil Saakashvili and reconsidered by the Ministry of Culture later.27 Despite the known principle that nature abhors a vacuum and despite the original governmental promise to erect a commemorative monument to the Russian aggression in Georgia, the pedestal of the Gori monument to Stalin still stays empty a decade after demolition. And as long as it stays that way, the fight between the state and the city is not over.
27 “Culture Ministry: Stalin Statue, Removed Three Years Ago, Planned to Be Put in His Museum,� Civil Georgia, July 30, 2013, accessed October 4, 2020, https://old.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=26319.