At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Soviet monuments in the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, were exiled from the public eye. Monuments have included sculpted statues of the Bolshevik revolutionary, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, statues of Red Army soldiers who liberated the city of Rēzekne in Latvia, and the Bronze Soldier monument (Pronkssõdur) in Estonia. These countries once stood under the occupation of the Soviet Union. Since 2022, the monuments are being dismantled and vandalized in public spaces in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.
I, as a young mind extending from the stems of Polish descent, acknowledge the justifiable foundation from which the Baltic people are deconstructing the statues. However, I firmly believe that removing the monuments is virtually eliminating the history which these countries are derived from. One can read about a certain monument, but if they do not view that monument in person, one may not fully conceptualize the exact way of life for the inhabitants in countries that resided under a totalitarian regime. Monuments speak volumes of a country’s history.
I feel that the monuments should not be removed – to safeguard the countries’ histories, so that all people may understand the realities of a nation being held captive under dictatorial oppression. The Baltic countries always identify the Soviet Union with disdain and aversion. In journalist Marcel Fürstenau’s DW.com article, “Lithuania topples last Soviet monuments,’’ he notes that the toppled monuments represented Lithuania’s subjection under harsh Soviet conditions. “The exhibitions focus on Lithuania’s oppression, which lasted nearly 50 years, when the country, like all Baltic states, was a Soviet republic,” Fürstenau said. “During this time, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians ended up in prisons and labor camps for political reasons, or were killed outright.” During World War II, Soviet secret service intelligence agencies also had Lithuanian prisoners tortured.
Moreover, journalist Isabella Kwai in her New York Times article, “Latvia tears down a controversial Soviet-era monument in its capital,’’ agreed. “In those years, tens of thousands of Latvians fled the country or were deported,” Kwai wrote. “And Moscow sent an equal number of Russians into Latvia. Such a large Russian-identified minority has caused fissures within the country. In recent years, the Latvian government has sought to limit the proliferation of Russian in Latvia.” Kwai stated that to the Latvian people, the Soviet Union committed both war crimes and crimes against humanity. According to Author Liivoja Rain of the Oxford Academic article, “12 Competing Histories: Soviet War Crimes in the Baltic States,’’ he provides a detailed set of examples to showcase the tyranny of Soviet occupation: “On the other hand, to reduce support for them, another wave of deportations was undertaken. Deportation also served the purpose of accelerating the collectivization of agriculture through ‘dekulakization’—the physical removal of well-off farmers,” Rain stated. Crimes also included the deportation of 90,000 Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians to Gulags in the cities of Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Omsk, and Amur.
Similarly to the beliefs of Lithuanians, the Latvian people viewed the Soviet-constructed 260-foot-tall Obelisk monument in the capital city, Rīga, as a symbol of oppression. However, while I unreservedly understand the feelings of the Baltic people, I believe that with these monuments removed from public spaces, the generations of individuals who arrive after us will not fully understand that these countries were invaded after denying the many Soviet ultimatums dispatched to their government and annexed by the Kremlin and then that they were held under the vice of the Soviets for nearly five decades, until they gained their independence in 1991. Simply reading about a specific Soviet-era statue is inadequate to wholly convey how the USSR affected Baltic political beliefs and the war crimes imposed upon the Baltic people. Therefore, when an individual travels to Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania, wherein they lay their eyes upon a Soviet monument, it would provide an extensive amount of information about what that country endured.
I spoke directly to my mother to get her feelings on the disbanding of Soviet monuments. My mother was born in the eastern Polish city of Brześć Litewski circa 1968, which today is situated in the Republic of Belarus. She recollected the moments when Polish factory workers began revolting against socialism, heading up strikes, and demanding more sufficient incomes. “In Brześć Litewski, there were a lot of military factories,” she said. “In these factories, the workers built equipment for Soviet troops, working day and night, 24/7 with little food and with little pay. With my family, we lived outside of the city, and we had to make all of our food by hand because the prices of food in the grocery markets were very highly-priced.” My mother noted the eternally painful remembrances of living in poverty and famine, as the USSR continued to consume the Polish economy. In 2021, my mother returned to the city – to the sites of the statues of Soviet infantry soldiers and USSR leaders who were remembered as warriors for defeating the German Reich. “When I saw those statues of Stalin and Lenin, all I could think about were the videos of the Red Army marching through Moskwa,’’ she commented. “And even when tourists came up to me, they genuinely said that seeing a monument in person is more personally deepening than just reading about the city and its history correlated with the Soviet Union.” Monuments symbolize the history of the city, and without preserving a historic monument, one can never truly learn about the details of a country beyond what is mentioned in a textbook.
As a result, the removal of Soviet monuments in the Baltic states abolishes individual segments of history. I feel that the monuments must be preserved so that people can completely conceptualize life under Soviet occupation and learn how these societies returned to being once they gained independence. From the experiences of my mother who lived in the Polish People’s Republic, I truly believe that it is of the utmost urgency that the Soviet monuments remain, for our societies not mislay the pathway of the past so people may fully understand the course of history.
