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Dominika Czarnecka
During the period of the Polish Peoples Republic communist propaganda
presented the Red Army solely in positive light, always in the context of “liberation”.
Officially, the Soviet soldiers were presented as “heroes”, “the glorious dead”,
the victors, always shown as “friends”, never as enemies and occupiers. In post¬
war monumental art the stone statues were marked with pride, self-confidence,
solemnity. Red Army soldiers were supposed to appear not only as fearless but
also as fear-inducing. Despite the multinational character of the Soviet army,
monumental sculptures represented only the white man with European facial
features.
‘The great campaign of the glorification of the Soviet Army through monuments
was combined with a ban on commemorating any people, groups and events sig¬
nificant for the socio-historical consciousness of the Polish nation that could, in
any way, slight or endanger communist interests. The new authorities very much
needed an ‘enemy’®, and not only an external one, but also an internal one. The
right to any commemoration (and not infrequently the right to burial) was refused
to members of the Polish Underground State, soldiers of the Home Army, and
victims of deportation to the Soviet Union. After all “(...) mourning is all about
representation” (Etkind 2013: 14). Directly after the war the communist authori¬
ties began to destroy extant Polish monuments that did not suit their policy (for
example monuments to Jézef Pitsudski and the Polish-Soviet War), while employ¬
ing the losses wreaked as a result of the conscious policy of the German occupiers
to their own purposes by blocking the rebuilding of pre-war memorials. In the
past, the Other was not commemorated: no monuments were erected to honour
the Other. The communist authorities in post-war Poland were no exception to
that rule. They placed on the pedestals those figures which they considered familiar.
Among them were Soviet soldiers. The crucial question here is what mechanisms
caused (in my opinion, very swiftly after the monuments were erected), part of the
Polish society to at some point transform the monumental representations of the
familiar into representations of the Other.
Monument in Service to Ideology: On the Danger of ‘Multiple Voices’
‘The above information provides an outline for undertaking a discussion related to
political and ideological functions of monuments, and thus, also for the creation
of images of the familiar and the Other in the context of monumental statuary.
This is because the monuments perform numerous functions within each of three
fundamental systems that permeate and supplement one another: ideology, art and
space.
5 Reference to the text of U. Eco, who noted that “(...) when there is no enemy, it is necessary to create
one” (Eco 2011: 11) and that “(...) inventing an enemy must be an intensive and continuous process”
(Ibid.: 35).