When new busts of Joseph Stalin started popping up in Russia in 2015, one might have thought people had seen it all. But 2016 marked a new era in modern monument history. First, a monument to a different tyrant, Tsar Ivan the Terrible, appeared in Oryol (see page 46), and, unlike Stalin, the medieval murderer was being honored in this way for the first time. Second, a giant monument to Prince Vladimir – the official symbol of Christian Rus’ and President Putin’s namesake – was unveiled just across from the Kremlin (see page 47).
While no one knows yet where this is all going and what role the new monuments will play in Russian urban life, we decided to look back at a few famous monuments that have become symbols of past eras.
In the evening of October 25, 1917, as Bolsheviks stormed the imperial palace in Petrograd, a spectacular benefit concert took place in Moscow starring Alexander Vertinsky, a renowned Russian modernist singer who performed as the tragic character Pierrot. Just past midnight, having washed off his makeup, he was making his way home with friends in a convoy of three horse-drawn cabs, holding the flowers that had been thrown onto the stage. As they passed Strastnoy Monastery, the shooting started. The cab drivers stopped and said they would not go any further. The singer headed home on foot, but before he did, he asked someone to deliver his flowers to the Pushkin monument.
This monument to Pushkin outside the Strastnoy Monastery was dedicated in 1880, but the fundraising drive started back in 1860, at the behest of alumni of the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, where Pushkin had been a student. This was no mere monument to a symbol of Russian poetry and culture. The sculpture became a manifestation of the very idea of a monument, one made by people, not officials, just as Pushkin had described in his 1836 poem “Monument,” some forty-three years before the statue appeared and only a year before his own death. In the posthumous publication of his collected works, the censors removed the line “for having glorified freedom in my harsh age.” Accordingly, these words were not among the lines from the poem inscribed on the pedestal.
By the early twentieth century, the classic monument, much like Pushkin himself, had come to symbolize the traditions of a moribund past. As early as 1912, the Bolsheviks’ star poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky, suggested that the classic writer should be thrown off “the Steamship of Modernity.” Thankfully, the call was not heeded, and the Pushkin monument facing Strastnoy Monastery was one of just seven Moscow monuments from tsarist Russia to survive the revolution.
As for Pushkin the poet, once people became disillusioned with the revolution, they again began to regard him as a towering genius, and this reverence had its tragic notes. In 1924, six years before committing suicide, Mayakovsky – yes, the same Mayakovsky – wrote a poem in which he recounted stealing the monument from its pedestal on Tverskaya in order to chat with it one-on-one. In the poem, Mayakovsky tells Pushkin that there are no poets left in the Soviet Union, and that people like him, like a fish out of water, “flap their rhyme gills more rapidly” as they lie stranded “on poetic sand.”
The critic Alexander Voronsky recounted a meeting, also on Tverskaya, with another poetic star of that era, Sergei Yesenin: “I saw him getting out of a sleigh. He was wearing a top hat and a Pushkin-style cloak that hung from his shoulders almost to the ground. It kept slipping off, and Yesenin kept purposefully pulling it back around himself. He was still sober. Amazed at these strange clothes, I asked him, ‘Sergei Alexandrovich, what’s all this? Why the costume?’ He smiled a strange, slightly mischievous smile and answered simply, naively: ‘I want to be like Pushkin, the best poet in the world.’ After paying the driver, he added, ‘I’m just so bored.’”
A year later, Yesenin killed himself. The funeral service was held near the Pushkin monument; the coffin carrying his body circled the statue three times.
Thus, poetry in the nation of workers and peasants was literally dying, but the monument to its main symbol continued to stand in the center of Moscow, which the Bolsheviks had once again made the capital. However, the new regime had little interest in a tsarist-era monument, and in the late 1920s, the Old Moscow Society had to petition the government to clean up the Pushkin monument, which had fallen into a state of disrepair.
In 1937, the official ambivalence came to an end. Pushkin was proclaimed a fighter for the people’s freedom, a victim of tsarism, and the generalissimo of literature. You see, the first year of Stalin’s Great Terror also happened to be the centennial of the death of “the sun of Russian poetry.” And it was celebrated on an unprecedented scale: there were Pushkin collected works, books about Pushkin, stamps with Pushkin’s portrait, and movies about Pushkin and based on Pushkin’s works. “Pushkin is our everything” became a meme of the Stalinist era. “Love for Pushkin, just like love for People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov, is a form of love for Comrade Stalin,” was the pithy formulation proposed by Nikolai Tikhonov, one of the “court” poets, at the February 1937 conference on the anniversary of Pushkin’s death.
As for the monument, in 1937 its pedestal was polished and re-inscribed, now with the entire original poem, including the references to noble sentiments and the struggle for liberty. Strastnoy Monastery was not so lucky. Already repurposed as the Central Anti-Religion Museum, it was demolished in 1938.
In 1950, in culmination of these transformations, the monument was rotated 180 degrees and moved to the other side of Tverskaya, to the site of the monastery that the statue had previously faced.
“For people of my generation there are two Pushkin monuments,” the writer Valentin Kataev wrote in his memoirs. “Two identical Pushkins stand one across from the other, divided by the noisy square, by streams of cars, by traffic lights, by the batons of traffic controllers. One Pushkin is ghostly. He stands in his former, legitimate spot, but only old Muscovites see him. For others he is invisible. In the unfillable void that is Tverskoy Boulevard’s starting point, they see the true Pushkin, surrounded by streetlights and a bronze chain. Today’s Pushkin is but a ghost to me.”
This tamed and sterilized Pushkin no longer seemed at all unique. He became indistinguishable from the dozens of other statues and busts depicting the poet, objects of mass production covering the Soviet Union almost as densely as monuments to Lenin. Context had converted the work of art into a kitschy symbol, as depicted in the song “A Tourist Family Getting Its Picture Taken by the Pushkin Monument,” by the famous bard Bulat Okudzhava. In today’s capital, the monument continues to be consumed by its surroundings: temporary decorations come and go around it, from giant fake grass sculptures to stage-prop arches and other strange objects.
And yet, the monument remains the most popular meeting place for tourists and Muscovites alike.
Exegi Monumentum Я памятник себе воздвиг нерукотворный, К нему не зарастет народная тропа, Вознесся выше он главою непокорной Александрийского столпа. Нет, весь я не умру — душа в заветной лире Мой прах переживет и тленья убежит — И славен буду я, доколь в подлунном мире Жив будет хоть один пиит. Слух обо мне пройдет по всей Руси великой, И назовет меня всяк сущий в ней язык, И гордый внук славян, и финн, и ныне дикой Тунгус, и друг степей калмык. И долго буду тем любезен я народу, Что чувства добрые я лирой пробуждал, Что в мой жестокий век восславил я Свободу И милость к падшим призывал. Веленью божию, о муза, будь послушна, Обиды не страшась, не требуя венца, Хвалу и клевету приемли равнодушно И не оспоривай глупца.
— Александр Пушкин
Exegi Monumentum* I have erected a monument to myself Not built by hands; the track of it, though trodden By the people, shall not become overgrown, And it stands higher than Alexander's column.
I shall not wholly die. In my sacred lyre My soul shall outlive my dust and escape corruption-- And I shall be famed so long as underneath The moon a single poet remains alive.
I shall be noised abroad through all great Russia, Her innumerable tongues shall speak my name: The tongue of the Slavs' proud grandson, the Finn, and now The wild Tungus and Kalmyk, the steppes' friend.
In centuries to come I shall be loved by the people For having awakened noble thoughts with my lyre, For having glorified freedom in my harsh age And called for mercy towards the fallen.
Be attentive, Muse, to the commandments of God; Fearing no insult, asking for no crown, Receive with indifference both flattery and slander, And do not argue with a fool.
— Alexander Pushkin
* Pushkin translation: Babette Deutsch
На фоне Пушкина снимается семейство. Фотограф щелкает, и птичка вылетает. Фотограф щелкает, но вот что интересно: на фоне Пушкина! И птичка вылетает.
Все счеты кончены, и кончены все споры. Тверская улица течет, куда, не знает. Какие женщины на нас кидают взоры и улыбаются... И птичка вылетает.
На фоне Пушкина снимается семейство. Как обаятельны (для тех, кто понимает) все наши глупости и мелкие злодейства на фоне Пушкина! И птичка вылетает.
Мы будем счастливы (благодаренье снимку!). Пусть жизнь короткая проносится и тает. На веки вечные мы все теперь в обнимку на фоне Пушкина! И птичка вылетает. — Булат Окуджава
A family portrait at Pushkin’s memorial.* Our arms round each other we stand in a row. Creating a record, concrete and pictorial, The camera man snapped us, so now we can go.
No trace in the photo of quarrels deplorable, Hostility, foolishness, these will not show. Our family’s perfect at Pushkin’s memorial. The camera that snapped us will prove this is so.
Preserved in this photo, though life is ephemeral And into the darkness we all have to go, We’ll live in the light here at Pushkin’s memorial. We looked at the birdie and that made it so.
— Bulat Okudzhava
* TRANSLATION: Lydia Razran Stone. The original is actually a song; the translation does not attempt to reproduce the meter and rhyme in that manner.
“Dear Comrade Vorovsky! I must tell you that there will soon be socialism. Socialism is our future life. That’s how Vovka explained it to me. It’s sad that you died and won’t be able to live in it. It will be a very good life. In socialism, the machines will do the work, Vovka said. And of course we will, too, a little. The work we want to do. We’ll draw, for example. And dance. And go to the movies. And the theater. And we’ll all go fishing. And everyone will write poetry. Everyone will be literate. And well-fed, and there’ll be no ration cards. The stores will all be full, take whatever you want. Meat and butter and candy and pastries. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is everyone will be friends.”
These were the kinds of letters written by the young hero of Yury Korinets’ autobiographical novel, who placed them at the foot of the monument to the Bolshevik Vatslav Vorovsky. But today no one views the monument with such awe: the sculpture is seen as more of a curiosity and goes by the names “I didn’t take your wallet,” “the back pain statue,” “the drunken cripple,” among other epithets.
Vatslav Vorovsky had a unique job: after the revolution he became a Soviet diplomat, meaning someone trying to convince the world that the Soviet government was not a bloody, tyrannical regime, but rather the world’s first example of a free nation of workers and peasants. In the end, he was shot in 1923, at a conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, by a former White Russian officer, Maurice Conradi, whose father and brother had perished at the hands of the Bolsheviks. A Swiss court acquitted the murderer, and in response the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic ties and tried to provoke nationwide outrage. The newspapers announced that everyone would be allowed onto Red Square for the Red diplomat’s funeral, while Mayakovsky summoned everyone to the ceremony in verse:
Done under by the fascist bandits’ horde, One last time Vorovsky will pass through Moscow.
Five years later, anger at Vorovsky’s murder enflamed the passions of a Kursk land surveying student named Leonid Brezhnev. In 1927 the future general secretary wrote a long poem “On the Death of Vorovsky,” in which all the features of the era are jumbled together, echoing Vertinsky’s decadent style, as well as Mayakovsky’s avant-garde poetry, and sincere joy at the USSR’s extreme upward mobility, allowing someone to show up “in a worker’s shirt, in simple boots” and “resolve all the world’s issues.” In Brezhnev’s depiction, Vorovsky is no “drunk cripple” – rather, he appears as a cheerful everyman, the kind of fellow who could be played in the late Soviet movie Killed in the Line of Duty by an actor previously known for portraying Don Juan.
Several urban legends attempt to explain bronze Vorovsky’s awkward pose. Some say the statue depicts the moment the bullet hit him. Others say the mold for the monument melted on its way to the factory, where it was cast in its distorted form. Still others say that someone intentionally played a cruel joke on their fellow party member, to take revenge for old slights.
The writer Dmitry Galkovsky, who describes the monument as a “hunched chimpanzee frozen in speechless rapture in front of the KGB building,” has a different explanation:
Once, I got to talking with the Moscow sculptor Chusovitin about how this could possibly have happened. He had a simple, professional answer.
“They wanted it lifelike. The person placing the order said: ‘it’s gotta be like he’s alive.’ And he splayed himself out, showing exactly what he wanted. ‘See, like this: when debating he had this characteristic pose, fingers all spread out, knees bent so his butt sticks out, with his other hand on his belt as if holding his pants up.’
“I believe it. That’s how it went. The artist knew it couldn’t be done that way, but he didn’t argue – he valued his life. The mafia had come, flashing its gang sign, saying, ‘Zhorik got killed, we want a tombstone for Zhorik, 1:1 scale, like he’s still alive.’ You can’t put up a 1:1 monument. In an open space even a tall person will look like a dwarf with a chicken’s head. Such are the peculiarities of human perception. But there’s no arguing with the mafia. And they pay well.”
In reality, as a young student, having just joined the revolutionary movement, Vorovsky found himself in the damp cells of Taganka Prison and developed a severe rheumatic disorder, resulting in stiffness in his spine and joint pain that tormented him to the end of his days. Contemporaries recorded various recollections of his strange habits, such as only being able to put his shoes on standing up, always with the words “thanks to his Imperial Highness.” At times he was said to spontaneously break into traditional Russian dance, as a good way to loosen up his joints, lending credibility to another sarcastic nickname for the monument, “the dancing diplomat.”
Nevertheless, the public perception of the statue as being unsuccessful or ugly is certainly exaggerated and relies on stereotypes. Of course, when compared with classical monuments such as the one to Pushkin, or with the faceless Soviet leaders sculpted in the romantic realist style of the Soviet era, the lifelike, silly, and touching Vorovsky comes as a bit of a shock. If you take the monument off its pedestal, it will resemble the modern urban sculptures of social misfits that rise directly from the sidewalk. This is a truly avant-garde, impressionistic sculpture, depicting a person in motion rather than in a typically static pose. Those days saw a lot of unusual, completely innovative sculptures, but almost none of them have survived, made as they were from all sorts of makeshift materials, including plaster, wood, or even ice, mounted on old pedestals, left to rot either for lack of funds and because they were political performance art. In that sense, Vorovsky was lucky.
The former building of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (the notorious NKVD) opens onto Vorovsky Square, but the bronze monument isn’t located there. As if ashamed of itself, it hides in the courtyard of a large building, where it is difficult to spot. This probably happened because when the monument was dedicated, there was still an ancient church on the square, and the monument was expected to take its place. But the church was only blown up in the 1930s, an entirely new era, one that the progressive monument fit into even less than the dancing diplomat would have.
Perhaps death at the hands of an assassin allowed Vorovsky to avoid perishing within the walls of the NKVD (later the KGB), where many of his fellow comrades met their own untimely end. The Vorovsky monument stands directly across from the complex of buildings that once housed this feared institution, and when guides from the Memorial human rights group bring their Topography of Terror tour groups to see Vorovsky, they don’t just talk about Red diplomacy. They also are sure to mention the firing squad basements located nearby, soundproofed and equipped with systems for draining blood.
In the fall of 1994, in Moscow’s newly opened Muzeon sculpture park, workers were raising onto a new pedestal a monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky that had been stored there since the fall of the USSR. When the mastermind of Soviet terror was placed vertically, rivulets of water suddenly streamed down the bronze statue’s face. It turned out that, while the 11-ton sculpture was lying on the ground, rainwater had collected in the deep recesses of its eyes. It took only a couple seconds for those present to realize this, but a strong impression was formed during those long seconds. It appeared as if the implacable titan, who had been exiled from Lubyanka Square by the revolutionaries of 1991, was weeping.
Dzerzhinsky was the founder and head of the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution (the acronym for which gave the Soviet secret police its nickname, the Cheka), chief editor of the magazine Red Terror, and a symbol of reprisals and purges. He died early, in 1926, at the very beginning of Stalin’s rise to power. Nevertheless, in popular memory his name is linked with Stalin’s genocide. After his death, the square in front of the headquarters of the Soviet secret police was named after him, and in 1936 Stalin ordered that a monument to him be placed there. At the same time, a fountain in the middle of the square, which had for one hundred years served as a reservoir and source of drinking water for central Moscow, was dismantled. Thus, in striking symbolism, the government shut off a source of life – and over the ensuing years, millions were killed in the purges.
While a contest was underway to pick a design for the Dzerzhinsky monument, WWII broke out, delaying its installation until 1958, five years after Stalin’s death, during the so-called “Thaw.” Across from the neoclassical building that terrified the entire city, the statue, itself over 17 feet tall and mounted on an equally tall pedestal, stood on a small island in the middle of the road. People joked that it was the most expensive monument, because to approach it you had to pay a policeman a three-ruble fine for jaywalking. Rumors circulated about short-lived attempts by brave souls to leave condemning inscriptions on the monument – their time would not come until the nineties.
The bronze Dzerzhinsky “lived” to witness the fall of the state midwifed by “Iron Felix” (a nickname given to the cruel Bolshevik long before he took metal form). In August 1991, a crowd filled the square; witnesses later recalled conversations about storming the KGB building. In the meantime, someone scrawled “executioner” on the monument, sparking the idea of toppling it, an idea that immediately captivated all those present. A truck appeared out of nowhere, carrying cables that people started attaching to the monument. But the politician Sergei Stankevich implored those assembled to stop, pointing out that, if they proceeded, damage would be caused to not just the monument, but also to the square and the subway infrastructure directly underneath.
In the end, the monument was removed intact that same night, but, according to the recollections of writer Vladimir Sorokin, the revolutionary crowd obediently waited for about two hours. “During those two hours, I had my first doubts about the future of the anti-Soviet revolution,” he wrote in an essay published in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in April 2014, soon after the Ukrainian revolution. It is worth noting that in Kiev no one stopped protesters from spontaneously destroying the famous monument to Lenin in the city center, after which the destruction of monuments to Lenin and other Soviet symbols became government policy in the new Ukraine. Today, Kiev’s empty pedestal on Taras Shevchenko Boulevard has become a canvas for modern artists, while its future is the subject of heated debates.
Similar processes also took place in Moscow. The story of modern Russian art includes the performance art piece by Alexander Brener, in which he stood where Felix once loomed and yelled at passersby across the car-filled square: “Everything’s fine! Keep working! I’m your new sales manager! Everything’s fine!” And not too long ago, when in 2015 the artist Pyotr Pavlensky set fire to a door of the KGB building, now the headquarters of the FSB, an image with the artist photoshopped in place of the monument went viral online.
These pranks are part of the rising debate around returning Iron Felix to his pedestal, a discussion that has been ongoing since the early 2000s. Whereas a decade or so ago no one took the idea seriously, since then the quarrel between supporters and opponents has repeatedly turned nasty. A recent restoration of the statue was supposedly not related in any way, but it seems ominous that, after its completion, all critical inscriptions on the monument had disappeared – this despite public assurances from Muzeon management that the original graffiti from August 1991 would be preserved as a historical element, while only inscriptions later left by park visitors would be erased.
And so, as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR passes, Moscow may be closer than ever to having Dzerzhinsky again stand in the square facing secret police headquarters, a stone’s throw from Vorovsky, hiding in a neighboring alleyway, and one subway stop away from Pushkin, sulking under his plastic archways on the site of a demolished monastery. RL
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