Oldal 379 [379]
The Familiar Converted into the Other
for battle. In this context the Soviet soldiers appeared as representatives of a foreign
army, protecting the interests of the USSR (Fig. 160).
Initially, one or more figure of a Soviet soldier was placed on the pedestals;
over time, the artists began to add the figure of a Polish soldier, a child or a worker
(Fig. 163). The introduction of Polish elements was one of the ways to widen the
subjective scope of Soviet commemorations. Owing to this, the monuments of Red
Army soldiers were to become more acceptable to Polish society. The communist
authorities might also have been concerned with (at least partial) adjustment of the
quantitative disproportions between the number of monuments of Soviet soldiers
and of monuments commemorating the Poles. When observing the spatial rela¬
tions between the figures on the pedestals, their placement against one another,
their poses, gestures, facial expressions, it is possible to notice that on the basis
of the monumental art the images of Soviet soldiers were created as victors, ‘pro¬
tectors’, leaders of Polish soldiers, and, finally, as “heroes of the labouring classes’
(Figs 161, 162). The resulting representations often perpetuated the relationship
of superiority of Red Army soldiers over other subjects, something that was not
without significance for the process of the othering of the images of the Red Army
soldiers by some observers. The Other never remains in a relationship of equality
with the familiar.
Analysing how the category of familiarity was converted into the category of
Otherness in post-war monumental art, it is worthwhile mentioning the linguistic
sphere. The inscriptions written on the commemorative plaques were most often
written in Russian or in both Polish and Russian. These formulas did not have an
informative character; instead, they served to glorify the Red Army and to falsify
reality.'” The communist propaganda, with regard to the Soviet monuments as
a whole, introduced the phrase “monuments of gratitude”, which was supposed to
allude to the alleged “gratitude” felt by Polish society for its ‘liberation’ by the Red
Army, which in fact was an occupying force. In this context, the process of othering
was not infrequently performed via the use of irony. Thanks to certain intangible
manoeuvres on the linguistic level, for example by giving the monuments derisive
names, a spiritual transformation of the monuments was performed.
In the Spatial ‘Grip’
The last of the three fundamental systems, which it would be impossible to ignore
when discussing monumental art, especially in the context of creating the category
of familiarity and Otherness, is space. Monuments always appear as elements in
space, in its three-fold meaning (Wallis 1971: 105; see Fig. 164).
A striking example of such manipulation may be found in the formulas which were used to praise Red
Army soldiers for dying while fighting for Poland’s ‘freedonY in the 1939-1945 period, while from 1939
to 1941 the Soviet army, along with the German army, occupied Poland.
377