A TALE OF TWO MONUMENTS
Not surprisingly, several memorials to Communism’s victims have been erected in the former Communist states of Eastern Europe. Here are a few notable examples:
The contrast could hardly be more striking.
The Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington D.C. is a three-metre-tall bronze statue on a tiny 214-square-metre wedge of land between New Jersey and Massachusetts avenues, a few blocks from Capitol Hill. The proposed Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Ottawa is expected to fill about half of its sprawling 5,374-square-metre site on Wellington Street just west of Parliament Hill.
The memorial in Washington cost a little over $1 million U.S. Apart from the land, provided at no charge by the U.S. Parks Service, its proponents received no support from American taxpayers. The current cost estimate for the Ottawa memorial is $5.5 million, with the federal government supplying $3 million plus land valued at between $16 million and $30 million.
U.S. legislators unanimously approved legislation authorizing the creation of a foundation dedicated to remembering the victims of a “communist holocaust” in 1993, but fully 14 years elapsed until the modest memorial was completed in 2007. By the time the much more ambitious memorial in Ottawa is inaugurated this fall, just half as much time will have passed since cabinet minister Jason Kenney first publicly endorsed the idea.
Ludwik Klimkowski, who chairs Tribute to Liberty, the charity formed to raise money for the Ottawa memorial, says it’s “really difficult for me to speculate why the memorial in Washington is as small as it is.” But, he adds, “I’m delighted that in Canada, we do recognize the victims of communism — our neighbours, our friends and colleagues from work — in such a meaningful way.”
Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, thinks it’s “very appropriate and fitting” that Ottawa’s memorial will be in a prominent location. “I think that’s wonderful, because it does give due place to the victims of the deadliest ideology in human history.”
Unlike Ottawa’s memorial, which focuses on the 100 million people who lost their lives to communist regimes worldwide, the memorial in Washington was designed to be uplifting. It’s a bronze replica of the papier maché Goddess of Democracy statue erected by student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. “It made a point that the ideas of freedom and liberty are universal,” says Smith.
Today, the memorial in Washington has become a place of pilgrimage — “all the more remarkable because of the modesty of the site,” Smith says.
Smith’s foundation has larger ambitions. It has begun raising money to build a museum on communism in Washington. Smith expects the foundation to do “something quite significant” — perhaps a groundbreaking ceremony — by the centennial of the Bolshevik revolution in 2017.
PRAGUE’S MEMORIAL TO THE VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM
Unveiled in 2002, the memorial shows seven bronze figures descending a flight of stairs, some with missing limbs or fractured torsos. The monument is meant to symbolize how political prisoners were treated by communism. “At night, with the lights on it, it’s really quite haunting and arresting,” says Smith.
THE HOUSE OF TERROR MUSEUM IN BUDAPEST
Opened in 2002 in a building where the Nazi and Soviet secret police had their headquarters and jailed or executed opponents, the House of Terror has become a memorial to the victims of those regimes. Displayed around the entire exterior of the building are the names and photographs of victims who were incarcerated or killed in the building.
THE MEMORIAL IN SIGHETU MARMAŢIEI, ROMANIA
The Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance — which bills itself as the world’s first memorial to communism’s victims — consists of the Sighet Museum and the International Centre for Studies into Communism. The museum occupies the former Sighet prison, with the cells transformed into rooms presenting a chronology of Romanian communism. Inside the former prison’s courtyard is a statuary group titled Cortege of the Sacrificial Victims, depicting 18 walled-in human figures.
MASK OF SORROW
Perched on a hill above Magadan, Russia, the Mask of Sorrow commemorates prisoners who suffered and died in Gulag prison camps in Stalinist times. Unveiled in 1996, it shows a large concrete face with tears streaming from its left eye and its right eye depicted as a barred window. Inside is a replica of a typical Stalinist-era prison cell.