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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, political, 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 oscillate 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
