Yuri Kadobnov
For more than 30 years, a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet Union’s feared secret police, stood guard in front of the KGB headquarters on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square.
Then, in August 1991, after a failed coup against Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, pro-democracy protesters toppled Dzerzhinsky’s 19-foot statue on his knob and coat. The colossus was thrown unsealed on a moor near the Moskova River, soon followed by other fallen Soviet heroes. The following year, the city of Moscow designated the chaotic variety of statues as a sculpture park called Muzeon, Fallen Monument Park.
In Russia, regimes have passed centuries, from the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy in 1917 to the cave of the communist dictator in 1991. But while the Soviets in giant components erased the Tsarist symbols, the fervor to demolish communist monuments in Russia died after the Soviet Union cave ind.
“People were beaten in a short time through the trials, through the cave of the old defense network, through daily problems,” says Masha Lipman, a political analyst who studied Russia’s conversion relationship with its monuments. “They lost interest in symbols in no time.”
The abandoned Soviet statues at Muzeon Park temporarily discovered the apple of many fashionable sculptures, adding fairytale characters, literary figures and summary works. Muzeon is now a component of Gorky Park, an urban oasis with a riverfront embankment, cafes and shaded gardens.
“It’s something that statues mean when they’re in remarkable places, in the main squares and in h8 streets,” Lipguy explains. “It’s very different when statues like this accumulate in a park.”
In Muzeon, the context of Soviet monuments has actually changed, he says, and the presence of so many other sculptures, the commonly apolitical maxim, has deprived them of their symbolic power.
Today, TheMoscovites take categories of yoga or roller skating near the “Avenue of Leaders”, which features statues of Soviet leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev.
“I’m those sculptures connecting our city,” says Artyom Golbin, a representative of the park and historian born in 1992, the similar year Muzeon was founded. “The hitale of Russia, and of the big apple, has other times, some bad, some good. However, we have to gather this, and those sculptures are a wonderful reminder of the Soviet era.”
Natasha Zamkovaya, passing Brezhnev with a friend, that monuments are obligatory to maintain the past. And the same goes for debatable statues in the United States, he said. “I object to simply sweeping the monuments. These other Americans had some kind of authority, their statues were not left there for nothing,” said Zamkovaya, 27. “They are also components of American history.”
In Muzeon, young Russians are more attracted to the new sculptures, says the Golbin Park guide, while foreign visitors tend to be curious about Soviet monuments.
A pink granite, Stalin, with his hand on his coat, looks a little ridiculous because he lost his nose when it was dismantled. Behind it is an elegant installation of 282 stone-rated advertisements in a cage, symbolizing the countless patients of the Soviet dictator. Sculptor Yevgebig apple Chubarov donated the paintings to Muzeon on the condition that they be exhibited next to Stalin.
The statue of Stalin itself is interesting, as it was once in the Soviet pavilion of the Nine and Nine World’s Fair in New York, with a pink Lenin granite, the founder of the Soviet Union. When the statues returned from the United States, Stalin went to Moscow and Lenin to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
During street protests in 2013 opposed to The Kremlin-subsidized Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich, the Statue of Lenin collapsed as a symbol of Russian rule. After Russia annexed Crimea and fostered an armed emergence in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainians demolished the numerous statues of Lenin that dot their country.
On the other hand, Lenin is celebrated in the cities and vagabonds of Russia, and not only in the Moscow Sculpture Park.
Dmitri Kuznetsov, a guest of Muzeon, who resells the devoted icons of the outlets, says he finds the presence of Soviet leaders offensive. “These other Americans have long gone. Why blame someone who’s in a dead position? He’s not a Christian,” said Kuznetsov, 41. “They did what they did.”
The unique Russian who directly pointed to the murder of statues has led President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman to deplore the tendency to provide in the United States. A collector of Russian art perhaplaystation provided to buy statues of President Theodore Roosevelt at the Hitale Natural Museum in New York and a Russian colonial governor in Sitka, Alaska.
“Russians delight in feeding those who have lately been engaged in the overthrow of statues in the United States,” says analyst Lipman. “Fighting with the symbols of the afterlife does not necessarily help solve the disorders of the present.”
The statues themselves have a maximum logical social change, she says, just as their removal does not limit it.
Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, can no longer have prestige in a central square, he said, but that has not undermined Russian security from remaining an almighty force.
“We see the Russian government adjusting more and more repressive,” Lipguy says. “And Dzerzhinsky is never very much in Lubianka, yet in this park, he does not reposition that.”
In fact, the statue of Dzerzhinsky, once knocked down, has been erased from obscene graffiti, restored and put back on its pedestal.
The statue is now protected by the government as a cultural monument.
Chec the thread.
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