Soviet War Memorials in Eastern Europe

   In 1945 major monuments were erected in Budapest, Vienna, Kaliningrad, Bucharest and Warsaw. Work on the first major Berlin monument was completed in 1946, with Sofia gaining its monument in 1953, while the large scale Czechoslovak memorial was erected in Bratislava as late as 1960. As well as the capital cities, Soviet war memorials were systematically erected in smaller towns and villages, where they joined, and sometimes replaced, the monument to the local heroes of the First World War. Overall the pattern of their erection, their location, size and type, and the urgency with which they were put up, was determined by a number of factors, including the geo-political significance of the country, the local political situation, and recent military history.
   The first wave of war memorials were erected for primarily geo-political reasons. They acted to mark on the map the area of Europe liberated by the Soviets, and to claim that territory as part of the Soviet zone of influence. It is no coincidence that some of the earliest monuments were erected at the extremities of Soviet military activity, in Berlin, Vienna and Kaliningrad and often have a visibly aggressive character. Later Soviet memorials took on new and sometimes paradoxical roles, taking as their idealistic focus the social transformations that following the establishment of Communist power, or even shifting the emphasis back into the distant past in search of the ‘roots’ of the Liberation in national history.
   Sculptors chosen to create war memorials in the Stalinist period had to work within an artistic and institutional context that had become politically sensitive. This was especially true after the radicalisation of cultural politics throughout Eastern Europe that took place roughly between the Soviet split with Tito’s Yugoslavia in June 1948 and the orchestrated celebration of Stalin’s 70th birthday in December 1949. The Sovietisation of artistic life was achieved through measures such as: the reform of the art academies on Soviet lines to exclude ‘formalist’ professors and teaching practices; the creation of a monolithic and obedient artists union; the banning of the private art market making artists completely dependent on state orders; the institution of annual exhibitions which were thematically and stylistically policed by Communist art critics; the takeover and centralisation of the art press on the model of the Soviet journal Iskustvo; and the energetic promotion of Soviet art through ‘friendship months’, cultural exchanges and exhibitions of reproductions of the masterworks of Socialist Realism.
   The period after 1945 saw the rise and fall of Socialist Realism in Eastern Europe closely following political developments in the Soviet Union. In the Stalinist period, and especially between 1949 and 1953, abstract works were automatically unacceptable, and mere traces of modernism could lead to critical condemnation on grounds of 'formalism'. For a work to qualify as Socialist Realist it not only had to be figurative, but also had to have certain ideological qualities, the most important of which was to show in a clearly understandable manner the future-in-the-present, to somehow embody progress towards the utopian state of Communism. Sculptors were forced to tread the difficult line between formalism and naturalism, and looked to the models provided by Soviet examples, and successful local sculptors, in an attempt to appease party critics.
   Beginning with Stalin’s death and especially after 1956, there was a deliberate relaxation of the totalising artistic doctrine of Socialist Realism. Later stylistic changes in war memorials and other public sculpture were arguably the result of both the winning of more ‘artistic freedom’ by sculptors, and the setting of new political demands on art by national Communist parties. This paper will discuss the major Soviet memorials of Budapest, Berlin and Sofia in the period of doctrinaire Socialist Realism, as well as briefly consider the public sculpture created in the changed cultural context of the post-Stalin era.

The Liberation Monument on Gellért Hill in Budapest

   The Soviet war memorials erected on May Day 1945 were joined on the anniversary of the liberation of Budapest, on the 5th April 1947, by Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl's imposing Liberation Monument. The military significance of the siege of Budapest, where retreating German troops had made a strategic stand against the Soviet army slowing their advance westwards through the winter of 1944/5, helped make Budapest an important site for the memorialisation of the War. The need to consolidate Soviet influence over Hungary, perceived as socially-reactionary and western-oriented, meant that monument-building was also conceived as a propagandistic tool in the struggle to win over the country to Communism and friendship with the Soviet Union.
   The building of the Liberation Monument is a good example of the degree to which the Soviets were prepared to intervene in all stages of the planning and erection of war memorials in Eastern Europe, to ensure that they meet their requirements in terms of content and style. It shows the way that memorials, while initiated by the Soviets, often on an informal basis, were then officially commissioned by local political institutions, because to admit the degree of Soviet interference would undermine their desired effect as expressions of gratitude from liberated peoples to the Red Army.
   According to the sculptor's generally accepted account, the head of the Allied Control Commission, Marshal Voroshilov, was driving through Budapest's city park in his jeep in January 1945 when he spotted Kisfaludi Strobl's bronze statue, Archer. Voroshilov soon turned up at the sculptor’s studio with his entourage and arranged for the war-damaged studio to be repaired and provisions brought to the hungry sculptor. A few days later Kisfaludi Strobl was called to a meeting with the Hungarian Minister of Defence, János Vörös, and told he had been chosen to create a monument to the fallen of the Red Army. The official commission came months later on the first of September 1945 and was directly from the Hungarian government to Kisfaludi Strobl, without even the semblance of a public competition.
   From the above account it is clear that Marshal Voroshilov played a vital role in choosing Kisfaludi Strobl to build the Liberation Monument. His personal involvement in the project was also felt in the autumn of 1945 when he discussed several plans with the sculptor and acted to have the site of the monument moved to Gellért Hill, having found the two sites suggested by the City Council unsatisfactory. The new location, on the top of a hill visible for miles, was designed as a constant reminder to the people of Budapest of the identity of their liberators; this was reinforced by the fact that Gellért Hill was also the site of the fortifications built by the Habsburgs after the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848/9, with the aim of both militarily guaranteeing and symbolically expressing Habsburg power over Hungary.
   Commentators have over time sought to emphasis different aspects of the monument, depending on the changing political context, just as its position within Hungarian public opinion has also shifted. An idea of the original intentions of the sculptor can be ascertained from the description in Kisfaludi Strobl's memoirs, published in 1969. In the centre is the 'passionate yet straightforward' 13 metre Genius of Liberty, before it stands a 6 metre statue of a Soviet soldier with a flag and machine gun, with 'the calm, self-assured, facial expression of the victorious'. The youth with a torch on the base symbolises progress and the spirit of liberty, the figure fighting snakes expresses the achievement of victory over fascism. There are friezes on the two sides of the base representing the Soviet-Hungarian meeting (i.e. the moment of liberation) and the drive to build up the country.
   It should be noted that the sculptor uses allegory to express the idea of the fight against Fascism, the spirit of Progress and the genius of Liberty, a mode somewhat out of keeping with the literalistic Socialist Realist versions of the same themes that can be seen in later monuments. As a result, although commentators at the time described Liberty as handing over the palm of eternal gratitude to the liberators, the statue is, as with the other allegories, open to more than one interpretation, and is not tied through its imagery to the actions of Soviet troops. The side figures have also been seen by critics as symbolising more abstract concepts such as Enlightenment and Struggle, Culture and the Force of Nature, respectively, as well as the original, more historically specific meanings associated with the Second World War and the building of Socialism.
   The allegorical basis of the Liberation Monument has enabled it to undergo a far reaching symbolic transformation over the years and especially since 1989. A degree of semantic instability became evident soon after its erection. It was whispered on the streets of Budapest, and reported as fact in the foreign press, that the monument was a reworking of a statue to the son of the wartime leader Admiral Horthy, a pilot downed on the Eastern Front. This urban myth developed over the years to include the notion that the palm leaf held by the Genius of Liberty had originally been a plane. Arguably, uncertainty about the identity of the statue matched disagreements about the nature of the Liberation, which, especially after the Revolution of 1956, was seen by many as an act of conquest and occupation.
  After 1992, changes to the monument, including the removal of the supporting figure of the Russian soldier, the red star, the memorial text and the sculpted frieze, plus the addition of a new open-ended text remembering 'all those who gave their lives for Hungary' has made it a symbol of liberty in general and even liberation from rather than by the Russians. The decision not to remove the female figure holding a palm can be attributed to it having become the most visible symbol of the city, having lost over time its original association with the Liberation. That the monument was able to detach itself in public consciousness from the events of 1945 and 1956 is at least partly due to the design of the monument itself, in which the allegorical figure and the two side sculptures need not refer specifically to the Soviet liberation of Hungary. By removing the literal Soviet soldier, the text and friezes the original meaning has been transformed in the changed political context of post-Communist Hungary.

The Soviet Heroes Monument in Berlin's Treptow Park

In the post-Communist era,  no such symbolic transformations have so far been visited on the Soviet war memorial in Berlin's Treptow Park, at least not on a physical level. This is partly because the monument is protected by international agreement, but also reflects the fear that to destroy it would suggest a reversal of the historical judgement of the war represented by the monument. It's unobtrusive location in the suburb of Treptow and the practical problem it's removal would constitute, have led to its being left alone by the authorities. While no longer the site of official public celebrations on Liberation Day, the Day of the Soviet Army and the Anniversary of the October Revolution, it has gained some popularity as a site of private and unofficial remembrance for those former East Germans nostalgic for the old regime.
   While Treptow was the largest and most significant of the war memorials erected in Eastern Europe after 1945, it is also somewhat of an exception to the overall pattern. Treptow was conceived more as a victory monument than a liberation monument and was erected directly by the Red Army. The sculptor, Evgenii Vuchetich, was both Russian, and one of the new generation of home-grown Socialist Realist sculptors who received their artistic training in the 1930s. Most other war memorials in Eastern Europe were created by sculptors who were nationals of the country in which the monument was to be erected, and frequently successful practitioners from the pre-War regime.
   The monumental complex begins with two victory arches, passing under either of them you first catch sight of a statue of a young woman bent over in grief in the middle of a secluded clearing surrounded by weeping willow trees. This is Mother Russia mourning her murdered sons, and the sculpture provides a physical and emotional counterpoint to the towering, heroic figure of the Soviet soldier at the other end of the memorial. The tree-lined way leads to the main terrace, which you approach by passing between two huge, fairly abstract, hammer-like gates guarded by two kneeling soldiers, who like Mother Russia lower their heads in humility, suggesting perhaps how we, and the defeated German nation, should approach the memorial. Here it's not a question of representing the reality of the Russian soldier, but of representing the positive, idealised qualities of the heroic Red Army, so the sculptor makes use of the popular image of the chivalrous, medieval knight.
   Beyond the gates is a large arena, directly ahead are five mass graves of Soviet heroes, each bearing a bronze wreath; altogether there are 5,000 named Soviet soldiers buried in Treptow Park. Along the sides of the main area are 16 granite blocks with friezes on each side showing the events of the war; the eight blocks on each side bear the same pairs of friezes, but reversed, so that viewing the ensemble from either end you can see all sixteen images. Each bloc also carries a quotation from Stalin; again the same quotations are engraved on opposite blocs, but in Russian along one side and in German on the other.
   The great bronze statue which closes the monumental ensemble stands on a mausoleum, the inside of which is decorated with mosaics, and is reached by steps up the front of a kurgan-like mound. Walking up the steps to the mausoleum allows the visitor a view back over the whole complex, with the pieta visible through the hammer-like gates in the far distance. The statue depicts a young Soviet warrior, in his right hand, a lowered broadsword, symbolising the victorious conclusion of the war, in his left arm he is holding protectively a small child; under his feet there's the famous, and very effective, smashed swastika. The child is powerless and completely reliant on the Soviet soldier, and can be seen as representing defeated Germany.
   Turning our attention to the eight pairs of granite blocks along the sides of the main area, the overall impression given is that relieves tell the story of the war from the Soviet point of view, with many representations of the horror and destruction of war. There are scenes of German bombers destroying buildings, as the angry inhabitants shake their fists at the sky, presumably vowing revenge. As if in direct response to the destruction depicted, two other friezes show ordinary people bringing what look like silver goblets and other valuables to contribute to the war effort. Even more literal is the scene of workers bringing weapons and helmets to a soldier, again symbolising the importance of the home-front and wartime sacrifices in the era of total war, as well as contributing to a mythologizing history of the Great Fatherland War.
   Warfare itself is represented in the relieves partly by literally rendered scenes of fighting, showing Soviet troops flying into the attack, like a freeze-frame from a war movie. There are also stylised, optical designs, with identical soldiers with fixed bayonets repeating and receding into the distance and a ghostly face of Lenin on a huge flag above and, presumably, in their heads as they go to face the enemy. Another relief shows a slightly flattened image of a worker, sailor and soldier on a balustrade guarding Leningrad's well-known cityscape. The relief is reminiscent of Deineka's 1927 work The Defence of Petrograd, and makes a link between the Revolution, Civil War and Second World War, as well as being a faint echo of the artistic modernism of 1920s Russia.
    The suffering and sacrifices of the Soviet people are unusual themes for Soviet war memorials in Eastern Europe. The standard themes for relieves were scenes of heroic Soviet soldiers engaged in fighting the enemy and the moment of liberation, when the Soviet troops first come into contact with the grateful inhabitants of the liberated territory, the Treptow monument, however, does not dwell on the liberation theme.    Instead of scenes of liberation, the rest of the friezes are mostly taken up with images of mourning and the burial of Russian war dead. As with warfare there is a mixture of 'realistic' scenes of death and grieving, showing, for example, a soldier with a dying child, burying the dead hero with a wreath and Soviet flag and more grieving mothers, and stylised representations, showing a line of identical soldiers taking part in a military ritual, apparently taking turns to kiss the Soviet flag in front of an officer.
  
The Sofia Monument to the Red Army

   The influence of Treptow can be felt in Sofia's Soviet Army Monument, both in the overall parade ground layout and in details such as the bronze wreaths that mark the boundaries of the memorial. However, the Soviet Army Monument arguably goes beyond the primarily commemorative function of Treptow; along with war heroism, the Sofia memorial celebrates the building of Socialism and the Communist utopia. Built in 1953, much later than the Budapest or Berlin monument, the memorial was conceived at the height of the Stalinist attempt to remake Eastern Europe in the image of the Soviet Union, and the Sofia Soviet Army Monument can be read as a historical documentation of the utopian vision of the Stalin era.
    The distinctive central group of the monument stands on a huge stone column and reaches 37 metres; its sudden appearance, protruding above the trees as you approach it through the surrounding park, makes a startling first impression. The column itself stands on a large, raised, square base, from one side of which stairs lead down to the parade ground area. On the other three sides of the base are large bronze friezes that depict the October Revolution of 1917, the Fatherland War of 1941-45, and the Soviet home front during the War. The parade ground is bordered by large bronze wreaths and was designed to provide an appropriate ceremonial setting for the usual anniversary public rituals. At the other side of the parade ground are two very striking sculptural groups that both portray intense and emotional scenes of fraternisation between Soviet soldiers and Bulgarians at the moment of Liberation.
   The 'Russophilia' evident in these scenes of 'Greeting the Soviet Troops' is a major theme of the monument: a life-size bronze Russian officers accepts a bouquet of flowers from a worker carrying a flag, they stare into each others eyes as they prepare to embrace; a Russian sits on a motorbike as a woman helps a small child climb onto his shoulder, he's also staring into the eyes of a moustached peasant, while another peasant woman is offering him some fruit; another pretty girl plays with a button on a huge Russian soldiers great coat as he looks on affectionately, machine gun slung down across his back. The sculptures, by Ivan Funev, are full of optimism and pathos; they seem over-the-top and embarrassing, and are representative of the radically different artistic and political atmosphere in the Eastern Europe of the 1950s.
   Two of the bronze friezes around the base of the monument show scenes of warfare; their composition is similar, based around a red flag and conveying the heat of the battle by showing soldiers frozen in motion and shouting out war cries. The historical difference between the Russian Revolution (by Lyubomir Dalchev) and the Second World War (V.Sidarov) is suggested by headdress (caps in 1917, helmets in the War) and the fact that the artillery piece in the World War II scene is larger and has tyres. The juxtaposition of the October Revolution and the Second World associates the defeat of the Nazis with the Communist seizure of power in Russia, and by implication in Bulgaria too. The third sculptural frieze gives a picture of life behind Soviet lines during the War; Doishinov's The Home Front makes reference to collectivised agriculture, heavy industry and the planner. Unlike the scenes of warfare at Treptow, there is no suffering or destruction, but only an advertisement for the achievements of the Soviet system; it was no coincidence that Bulgaria was at that moment undergoing the brutal and far-reaching Sovietisation of economic and social life.
   The central group towering far above the base depicts a Soviet soldier leading a Bulgarian worker, his wife and small child into the future. The soldier holding a machine gun above his head in celebration of victory and stands between and slightly above the new man and woman. The subjugation of the liberated peoples to the Soviet army is a recurrent theme in early war memorials; although the Soviet soldier here takes the Bulgarian man patronisingly under his arms, the 'symbolic subjugation' is far from the crushing victory enjoyed by the Soviet hero of Treptow, where liberated Germany is played by a defenceless child. From photographs you can see the contented, beatific smiles of the healthy Bulgarian nuclear family and the Soviet older brother; they are all gazing determinedly into the distance as they step forward, using a typical device of Socialist Realist artists to suggest (as was obligatory) the idea of material progress and the future-in-the-present. Again, the subject of this war memorial proves to be more about building Socialism than commemorating Soviet wartime sacrifices (or 'marking territory' for that matter).
   Another striking feature of the Sofia Soviet Army Monument is the many depictions of women soldiers. They appear in Funev's Liberation scenes, one is lightly holding a lethal-looking machine gun in one hand and waving to a friend another is patting a child's head, with a gun slung over her back, tunic tightly buttoned up with long hair kept in check by a beret. The scenes of the October Revolution and the Second World War both feature women with superman-like cloaks and hair flying in the wind; Dalchev's October's emotional focal point is another young woman yelling and brandishing a pistol and pointing forward. This representation of women in combat is partly due to their actual role in the fighting; just as they are fully represented in the scenes of the home front doing men's work, dressed in overalls and man-handling an enormous aircraft propeller. It also represents an ideal state of equality under Socialism in which women were 'liberated' into the industrial workforce. A third explanation is to be found in the fact that women fighters were associated with the ‘anti-Fascist resistance’, representing armed women is another way of emphasising the role of the Bulgarian Partisans.
   A slightly later Bulgarian example, Kruchmarov's 'Brothers Burial Mound’   memorial of 1956 in Sofia, has on first sight all the same characteristics of the Stalin-era Soviet war memorial. It has an obelisk, star, male and female soldiers, friezes showing the heat of the battle and joyful scenes of celebration as Bulgarians and Soviet soldiers finally meet and an orthodox parade ground architectural layout.  The side groups literally depict the Liberation in the form of a partisan, Russian soldier and old mother Bulgaria; Progress receives concrete visualisation in the form of a communist leader showing the new man and woman the future, representing a late, high point for Socialist Realism in Eastern Europe. Signs of the quite radical changes to come can though perhaps be noted in the name of the monument. ‘Brother's burial mound’ is somehow more euphemistic than 'Red Army memorial' and puts less stress on the Russian soldiers, and more on the fallen brothers-in-arms of the partisan struggle. Additionally, the fact that there is a female as well as a male soldier at the centre of the monument, if the conclusions drawn above about women fighters are correct, could in itself identify the ‘Brothers' Burial Mound’ as a partisan rather than a Soviet war memorial.    

Soviet War Memorials of the Post-Stalin Era

    Political changes after the death of Stalin in 1953 had important ramifications for art. These included a movement away from commissioning grandiose monumental projects designed for mass mobilisation towards the production of smaller scale public sculptures that 'reflect the everyday life of the people.' It famously involved the destruction of statues of Stalin, but could also mean the removal of works of high Socialist Realism, whose 'sham optimism' and stylistic excesses had become an embarrassment to both artists and politicians, and a triumphal return of works (and sculptors) previously sidelined for their ‘formalism’. In terms of the creation of war memorials in the post-Stalin era, there is a distinct trend towards a less figurative approach and an abandonment of the ideological literalism of high Socialist Realism.
   One kind of later Soviet war memorial involves the stylised interpretation of traditional Liberation themes. Agamemnon’s Liberation Monument on a hill near Pécs in Hungary uses a woman to represent Victory, as Kisfaludi Strobl had done with his Genius of Liberty in the 1947 Budapest Liberation Monument. The difference is that Agamemnon’s inspiration comes directly from ancient Greece, the statue is clearly based on the Nike of Samothrace and is given a more abstract treatment. He also made use of non-traditional materials, integrating his headless copper-plated sculpture in a concrete setting, the large scale of which allows the monument to be noticed from the town below, even if the 8 metre metal figure is still barely visible. The only literal connection suggested between the monument and the event it purports to celebrate is the etching of 1945-1975 on the back of the base.
   Viktor Kalló's Soviet Heroic Memorial of 1965 is composed of two larger-than-life human figures with simplified features standing before a huge reinforced concrete pyramid on a sloping plinth. 'Liberation' is expressed by the fact that one figure has his arms down, and the other raises them both up to the sky. The result is an easily readable metaphor for personal inner liberation which could usefully stand in for the actions of Soviet troops in 1945, replacing the literal depictions of Soviet soldiers and scenes of liberated peoples greeting the Red Army. After the events of 1956 the figure of the Russian soldier-liberator was somewhat discredited in Hungary and sculptors had to find more indirect means to convey the idea of liberation.
   A similar tendency to avoid the subject can be seen in Pál Pátzay's 1967 Debrecen Family Liberation Monument, which depicts a generic family group that could be waving to approaching Soviet troops, but look more like they're waving goodbye. The moustached and respectable-looking man has his arm lightly around his wife, who's cradling their child; it could be another version of the central group of the Sofia Soviet Army Monument, except the soldier is missing, the family members' faces are inscrutable and supercilious (even the child has a knowing look), gone are the naive smiles, and they're not very 'proletarian-looking'. It's a world and an era away from the optimism of the previous decade with its joyful and obligatory scenes of 'Greeting the Soviet troops'.
   The adoption of metaphorical and increasingly abstract solutions to convey ideas that had been expressed literally in the 1950s arguably reflects a decline in political utopianism. People could no longer be expected to believe in the imminent arrival of an earthly paradise populated by New Men and Women as portrayed in Socialist Realism; Communist parties were forced to look elsewhere for sources of political legitimacy.
   As a final example from Bulgaria, Lyubomir Dalchev's Brothers’ Burial Mound of 1974 in Plovdiv is a primarily architectural work, with overlapping concrete slaps covering a sunken memorial chamber; it is simultaneously reminiscent of the ancient Thracian burial mounds that dot the Bulgarian countryside and quite futuristic. If you descend the ramp into the heart of the monument you see a strange mixed-media installation, showing figures that look like huge models for a nativity play. The scenes show the hard life of the Bulgarian people under the Ottoman Yoke, the liberation from the Ottomans and the heroism of Russia in the revolutionary struggle against Fascism and Capitalism, the partisan movement and the victory of Socialism. The whole effect is to suggest Bulgarian folk tradition, and has to do with the Bulgarian Communist Party's discovery of national revivalism as a tool for mass mobilisation. Arguably, the utopian aim of using monuments as propagandistic tools to help create new man and woman and a socialist society was overtaken in the post-Stalin era by the need to justify the historical legitimacy of the party-state. 
   As a concluding remark on post-Stalin developments, I would like to suggest that there was a link between form and function as far as Soviet war memorials in Eastern Europe are concerned. The early monuments functioned primarily to express Soviet domination, both internally and internationally, as well as to commemorate the actual sacrifices of the soldiers of the Red Army during the Second World War. Memorials of the period of high Stalinism in Eastern Europe, from 1949-53, had the extra task of visualising the coming worker’s paradise, of embodying the global model of the Communist utopia. Later war memorials, on the other hand, were used by local Communist parties in their quest for local political legitimacy, often in the shape of national revivalism. They were inclined to forget or diminish the role of Soviet domination in the political discourse of their monuments and play up the role of the national Communist party in their country’s history. Arguably, the shift at least partly explains the decline in literal depictions of Soviet soldier-liberators and the increase in the number of abstract and metaphorical interpretations of the liberation theme, as well as the growing stress on partisans, local victims of fascism, and 'forerunners' of the Liberation in earlier national history.

Reuben Fowkes