They tore down statues; little changed
MOSCOW — Elated by the defeat of a hardline communist coup in August 1991, thousands of mostly young Muscovites gathered in front of the KGB headquarters and argued over how best to seal their victory with a bold, symbolic act.
After some discussion, recalled Sergei Parkhomenko, then a young journalist covering the scene, the crowd turned its passion — more euphoria than anger, he said — on the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless founder of the Soviet secret police, which stood in a traffic circle in front of the Lubyanka, the forbidding stone building that housed the KGB.
The removal of the statue, accomplished with help from a crane sent by Moscow city authorities, was greeted with cries of “Down with the KGB” and sent a powerful message that change had finally come to Russia.
Or so it seemed at the time. Nearly 30 years later, Russia is ruled by a former KGB officer, President Vladimir Putin, and Dzerzhinsky is honored with a bust outside the Moscow city police headquarters.
As the United States boils with anger over police brutality and racism, the experience of Russia since the collapse of communism offers a cautionary lesson in the perils and disappointments of toppling monuments.
Russia never engaged in a deep reckoning with its Soviet past, airing injustices and holding people accountable. Instead, atrocities were glossed over and some of the old elite, particularly in the security services, has reconstituted itself in power.
Parkhomenko said he had no regrets about the removal of Dzerzhinsky — known as “Iron Felix” because of his unbending defense of Soviet communism — and certainly doesn’t want him back.
But he lamented that what had been a highly gratifying symbolic strike against the old order did not bury, or even really dent, the system the statue represented.
“Everything has turned around,” he said.
“The putsch failed, but 30 years later it has won.”
The Kremlin has mostly focused on erecting new statues, not restoring those demolished in the 1990s. Among the new additions is a towering monument to Lt. Gen. Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the
AK47 assault rifle. The bronze statue, erected in 2017 on one of Moscow’s busiest thoroughfares, depicts Kalashnikov cradling one of his automatics, looking from a distance like an aging heavy metal guitarist.