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The Familiar Converted into the Other
were erected in central locations in Polish towns (in the market squares, plazas, and
main streets), excluding the monuments erected in permanent cemeteries.’
William John Thomas Mitchell claimed that the word ‘image’ is “notoriously
ambiguous” (Mitchell 2005: 2). He also arrived at the conclusion that there is
“(...) the wide variety of things that go by this name. We speak of pictures, statues,
optical illusions, maps, diagrams, dreams, hallucinations, spectacles, projections,
poems, patterns, memories, and even ideas as images (...)” (Mitchell 1986: 9). This
text describes the images of Soviet soldiers preserved in stone, bronze or sandstone,
in a material that becomes the carrier of these images. Therefore, the monument
appears as a material representation of images of Red Army? soldiers in a real physi¬
cal space and at a given time. This is significant inasmuch the type of carrier does
not remain ‘invisible’, i.e. neutral, in the context of its influence over viewers and
their interpretation of the messages transmitted with the carrier’s help. “Material
forms create very different embodied experiences of images and very different affec¬
tive tones or theatres of consumption” (Edwards & Hart 2005: 5).
The images perpetuated by the monument will differ from those that circulate
as various types of photographs of the very same monument. Every medium pos¬
sesses its own unique abilities to present and distort reality, which is why it is not
without significance that the subject of the discussion is monuments in the true
sense of the word, and not their images repeatedly copied and multiplied.
The Familiar and the Other: Indelibly Divided, Irrevocably United
Before 1944 there were no monuments to Soviet soldiers in Poland. Rather, negative
stereotypes of the Red Army soldier—a Bolshevik—and strong anti-communist
sentiments prevailed. Long before WWII broke out monuments formed a power¬
ful tool for propaganda and conflict for the Russian—and later Soviet—authorities
in the territories they controlled. In the nineteenth century, Polish territory was
the most explosive region of the Russian empire and the monuments erected by
the most often-used form. A separate group is formed of monuments whose creators made use of read¬
ily available wartime props (for example tanks, cannons, planes). The present analysis is concerned with
sculptured monuments.
> In the Polish People’s Republic, apart from Red Army monuments in central urban locations, several
hundred such objects were erected in permanent cemeteries. These objects are not covered by this ana¬
lysis. On the one hand, there are differences as to their perception and treatment by the Poles, due to the
character of necropolis space. On the other hand they were, in a similar way to the monuments in central
localities, employed for the purposes of communist propaganda, yet their influence and function in the
social imagination was, in principle, weaker.
> The Red Workers’ and Peasants’ Army (RKKA, Raboche-Krest’yanskaya Krasnaya Armiya) officially
came into existence in February 1918, but was formed very slowly. Until the autumn of 1919 it practically
existed on paper only (Pipes 2010: 15). The RKKA was the full name of the Soviet armed forces, and
in use until 1946, although the name was popularly shortened to the Red Army. From March 1946 its
official name became the Soviet Army.
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