Oldal 370 [370]
368
Dominika Czarnecka
The Familiar Converted into the Other:
Constructing Otherness Through the
Monumental Representations of the Red Army
in Poland (1940s—1950s)
All societies produce strangers;
but each kind of society produces its own kind of strangers,
and produces them in its own inimitable way
(Bauman 2000: 35)
From 1945 Polish communists began to “perpetuate in stone” images of Red Army
soldiers on a mass scale, continuing to do so until the end of the 1980s. These
images form pretext for a more in-depth discussion of the meaning and power of
monumental statues within urban space. They also give a possibility to construct
within this discussion—and with its help—the category of Otherness.
It may seem an outright banality to claim that the basic function of every
monumental statue (Lat. monumentum) is to commemorate a person or an event.
Contrary to this popular definition, however, the role of the monument’s image is
not one-dimensional because every monument tells us about “the community, and
not only the community it is to commemorate, but also the one which founded
it; thus, a monument is a signum temporis, it bears witness to the social, politi¬
cal, state-related, national and generally human values of the era in which it was
erected” (Grzesiuk-Olszewska 2003: 5). I would like to add one more element to
this list. The monuments not only relate to the past and the ‘present’ of the time in
which they were constructed, they also relate to the future. Monuments are erected
with future generations in mind, and these generations’ representatives perform
renewed interpretations of the meanings of objects, re-evaluating their status.
The present article is an attempt to provide answers to a few questions that oscil¬
late around the features and functions of monumental representations. It is a rather
subjective, though by no means accidental, measure to refer to in the process of
explanation and interpretation of a group of monuments to Soviet soldiers—there
are several dozen such objects—that were erected in Poland within its post-war
borders in the 1940s and 1950s.’ The analysis covers only those memorials that
' During the first years after WWII a total of over 400 Red Army monuments were erected in Poland in
central localities. Not all of the monuments were sculpture art—the obelisk presented the simplest and