The generals’ last battles

Is there a close parallel between the removal of monuments to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee and others from public spaces in the US South, and the banishment of Jossif Stalin and Vladimir Lenin statues, with others of similar ilk, from well-attended locations in Estonia?

Not entirely. Since 2015, well over one hundred Confederate symbols have been moved into storage away from public visibility in the US southern states. In Estonia similar monuments have been either taken down, stored away and/or destroyed. Or as an alternative in some instances, relocated from places of prominence to open air parks and left for public display.

Estonia in 2018 at its Museum of History, located in Maarjamäe Palace, opened a collection of 16 statues and monuments that can be viewed on its outside location or virtually via internet. They mainly represent Estonian Communist vanguard from the time of the 1917 Revolution to the post-WWII Soviet occupation era. From the Central Committee elite to secret police commanders to Red Army Generals, like in the US South, they all individually represent the repression and inhumanity that dominated those periods of history.

The display was assigned a distinct objective: to use the exhibit in an educational context that helps to focus on totalitarianism and understand the underpinnings of its societal ideology. These were the political proxies and violent henchmen of Lenin and Stalin that were honoured and memorialized in public for their success in oppression. These acolytes of communist dictatorship were reviled by the vast majority of Estonians.

It’s been said that those who disagree with the removal of statues depicting slave era Southern military commanders see it as an indignity to the memory of the forefathers. Others argue that it’s a denial of the actual historical record.

Russia sees these removals as an insult of its “glorious” past. This past April a monument dedicated to Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev was taken from its site in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Konev was a WWII Red Army commander, prominent in the fight against the Nazis in Czechoslovakia, but also the Russian military leader who suppressed the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the strategist who prepared the assault against the “Prague Spring” in 1968.

Even though Konev was key in battling German forces in WWII, he was also a despised enemy to all anti-Soviet Hungarians and Czechoslovakians. Moscow has taken the statue’s removal as an affront and initiated criminal proceedings against the perpetrators, not withstanding that the “crime” occurred in a foreign country. To Russia he was a war hero, to non-Russians a vicious conqueror.

One is reminded of the massive Russian 2007 cyber attack against Estonia’s digital infrastructure, the first such totally crippling assault in cyber warfare history. It was prompted by Estonia relocating a monument to the Soviet Red Army, the very same military that helped to continue a repressive occupation of Estonia after the defeat of the Nazis. The justification for the relocation was indisputable and it was moved with due solemnity to a military cemetery where it stands to this day.

Yet Moscow saw it as an unacceptable affront. Ironically, the Kremlin’s knee-jerk reaction helped to make IT-astute Estonia into a world-recognized centre for research and development of cyber warfare defense.

In 1947 Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisan Jonas Noreika was killed. In 2019 a plaque dedicated to him in the Academy of Science was removed. To some he was a Lithuanian hero and patriot, to others a Nazi collaborator. These arguments have been associated with memorials to Leopold II in Belgium, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi in the UK, John A. MacDonald and Egerton Ryerson and others in Canada etc.

Should monuments symbolizing or representing an inhuman, repressive past be removed or placed in an exhibit accompanied by a non-ideological historical narrative (if that’s possible, ed.)? Before opening the relocated statue display, the Estonian Museum of History had simply placed them in an open field on the Museum’s grounds. They suffered exposure to the weather, were covered in weeds and deteriorated in appearance. The place became an abandoned graveyard. The statues were not recognized for sufficient historical significance to be properly displayed but had enough cultural heft not to be destroyed.

Can the relocated statues, if prudently and thoughtfully “re-branded”, actually heal old wounds? On the other hand some argue that re-erecting them for display elsewhere is offensive to those who suffered under totalitarianism or intolerance.

In the US South, the removal of Confederate monuments is meant to be a process of vacating painful relics of a racist past in a search for social commonality. In Eastern Europe it’s intended to negate the power these statues once wielded and to deflate any ambitions, domestic or foreign, for a return to the past.

As long as the current Russian leadership holds power, a search for a common Estonian-Russian language in statute removal will be impossible. But in the US, its indifference to the stand-off or vacuous commentary from the White House that makes healing old wounds unattainable.

LAAS LEIVAT