Soviet monuments become latest casualties
Backlash against war hits statues honoring troops from WWII
REZEKNE, Latvia — Deported to Siberia by the Soviet secret police as a child and stranded there for more than a decade, Dr. Juris Vidins has for years cursed the large statue of a Red Army soldier looming over the center of his hometown in eastern Latvia.
An inscription at its base honors the Soviet “liberators” who drove out the Nazis in 1944 — and who sent his father to a prison camp and the rest of the family to a frozen wilderness.
“This was not liberation, but occupation,” said Vidins, 84, glowering at the statue of a Soviet soldier cradling a machine gun.
“They liberated me from my family, they liberated us from our property and everything we had,” he said. “If that is liberation, I don’t want a monument to it.”
After trying in vain for years to get the statue torn down, Vidins is now rejoicing that, thanks to a wave of revulsion over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and everything connected with its military, he may soon see his dream come true.
Across Eastern and Central Europe, dominated by Moscow for nearly a half-century after the end of World War II, a long-running argument over whether the Soviet Union liberated the region from fascism or enslaved it anew has reached a decisive turn, just as what had been a grinding military stalemate in Ukraine has turned significantly against Russian forces.
Statues honoring Soviet troops have in recent weeks come down or been slated for demolition in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and the Czech Republic, all NATO members that have
rallied to help Ukraine on the battlefield with weapons and gone on the offensive at home against what they see as abhorrent tributes to Russian power.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, justified by false claims that the country was awash with Nazis who must be crushed just as Adolf Hitler’s real Nazis were, has sapped his country’s military and economic strength. Putin has also drained its most potent source of moral and political legitimacy: Russia’s claim, as the Soviet Union’s successor state, to the respect due the more than 25 million Soviet citizens who died fighting Hitler’s Germany.
“Monuments to a foreign army that has committed terrible crimes” have “no place in a democratic society,” Latvian President Egils Levits said in an interview in Riga, the country’s capital.
Russia responded with fury last month when the
authorities in Riga demolished a nearly 260-foottall obelisk that was built in 1985 as a memorial to Soviet soldiers killed during World War II. The Russian Foreign Ministry fired off a barrage of angry diplomatic complaints that Latvia, which has been free of domination by Moscow since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, had violated a 1994 pledge to respect war memorials. The ministry’s spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, accused Baltic States of indulging in “neo-Nazi bacchanalia.”
“Of course, Russia tried to intimidate us by using the same vocabulary they used during Soviet times to justify deportations and repression,” Artis Pabriks, Latvia’s defense minister, said in an interview. “They want to scare us.”
The war in Ukraine has largely vindicated longstanding warnings by Baltic States that Russia is an aggressive power that
cannot be trusted. But it has also blunted its capacity to terrify its neighbors, reducing the willingness of ethnic Russians abroad to rally publicly to Moscow’s side and exposing the weaknesses of its military machine.
“If they are not crazy, they will not try to touch us militarily,” said Pabriks. “Most of their troops next to us have now been sent to Ukraine,” he added, referring to soldiers previously massed along Russia’s western border who were redeployed.
The demolition of Soviet war monuments, he said, “is good and necessary” and means that “our Russian minority has a choice to make: They have to either support this country and be patriots or support Putin.”
“There will be zero tolerance of anyone supporting his war regime,” Pabriks said.
Many of the ethnic Russians living in Latvia,
about one-quarter of the country’s population, insist they want to keep the war monuments not out of support for Putin but to honor relatives who died fighting with the Soviet army.
When Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania broke away from the Soviet Union and regained their independence in 1991, they all quickly toppled statues of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, but left intact World War II monuments such as the Riga obelisk and the statue in Rezekne.
This lingering respect for Soviet sacrifice in Latvia was swept aside in June with the new law.
Small pockets of resistance remain, particularly among the large ethnic Russian populations of places such as Rezekne, Vidins’ hometown, and the eastern city of Daugavpils, Latvia’s largest concentration of ethnic Russians, which is hoping to protect its own World War II monument.
Aleksei Vasiliev, the first vice mayor of Daugavpils and head of the local chapter of the “Russian Union of Latvia,” said he owed it to relatives killed during the war to protect the monument, an unadorned metal spire that makes no mention of “liberation” by the Soviet Union. The city, claiming that the monument has artistic and cultural value, has appealed to the courts to try to save it from demolition.
“I will not lie down in front of bulldozers if they come, but I will kneel and pray that they stop,” Vasiliev said.
With the deadline for the demolition of their own monument approaching and the government in Riga threatening legal action against towns that disobey the prohibition law, municipal authorities in Rezekne recently conducted an online survey of public opinion but got no clear answer: 52% said they wanted the statue dismantled, 43% said they did not and 4% said they wanted it moved from the central park.
Rezekne’s mayor, caught between the law and a divided public, has not yet said publicly what will happen to the statue.
Vidins said he was confident that the mayor would have to demolish it. “It should have gone long ago,” he said, “and I’m delighted that it will, I hope, soon go.”
But many local Russians, including an old friend of the Vidins’, Vadim Gilis, think that would be an assault on their own identities and the memory of Russia’s war dead.
On a visit to the town’s sprawling Jewish cemetery, Gilis pointed to a grassy riverbank where Nazi soldiers, helped by local collaborators, murdered thousands of Jews.
“This is why Soviet soldiers came here,” he said.