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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 physical 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 affective 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 possesses 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 powerful 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 readily 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 analysis. 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. 369
