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The Familiar Converted into the Other
resentative communication routes. In such a case the new monument appears as
a certain ‘obstacle’, an element improperly located. The process of othering may
be deepened by such a localisation of a monument, which will place it in a certain
opposition (for example by placing the monument with its back towards the main
entrance to a temple) to other objects, deemed significant by the community for
historical, religious or national reasons. Finally, if the symbolism of the monu¬
ments drastically contradicts the symbols that construct its surroundings (for ex¬
ample, opposite the Red Army monuments, there were often religious symbols, or
symbols related to the pro-independence traditions of the Second Polish Republic),
then it will reveal itself as a foreign element. Concerning the monuments to Soviet
soldiers, all of the cases of surrounding space creating Otherness mentioned above
took place, although they did not necessarily appear jointly.
A different, but related, issue was the process of the othering of the space sur¬
rounding Red Army monuments that took place due to the effect of the Otherness
of the monument in the urban space. The monuments “(...) transform otherwise
neutral places into ideologically charged spaces” (Whelan 2005: 63). The space that
surrounded the monuments to Soviet soldiers was specially arranged and rebuilt
by the communist authorities. It was the Red Army monuments that initiated the
process of the othering of the surrounding space, not the other way round. There
was not a case in which urban space was changed or adapted to the monument
before it was erected. The othering of urban space as a result of the influence of
the Otherness of Soviet monuments occurred in a couple of ways. More often
than not, the premises of the most important communist authorities (party offices,
courts, the militia—the apparatus of repression), which undertook the construc¬
tion of “a better world on the Soviet example”, were located around new monu¬
ments to Red Army soldiers. This caused the monuments to be seen as a kind of
a cosmic axis, around which the national sanctities (communist in spirit) were
to concentrate. The ideological project of the authorities, however, assumed that
these would be ‘local sanctuaries’, directed towards ‘the East’, and thus, subject to
a certain superior structure, with the Kremlin as the axis mundi. The initial purpose
and décor of the buildings situated near monuments to the Red Army were not
infrequently changed (for example in extreme cases former places of worship were
turned into warehouses); alternatively they were obscured by new structures. The
communists gradually filled the spaces surrounding the monuments with the sym¬
bols of the new rule, not only not restoring the pre-war symbols, but also removing
those that had survived the war. The othering of space was reinforced by the new
toponymy. The Otherness of the Soviet monuments influenced the changing of
street and square names where the monuments were erected.'° In this way the com¬
13
In Toruñ, a monument to the Red Army was officially unveiled on May 9, 1946. In February 1950,
the present Theatre Square was renamed Red Army Square—the name survived until the end of the Polish
People’s Republic (Golon 2003: 177).
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