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380 Dominika Czarnecka memoration was doubled, the rank of the object became reinforced and the ideological message intended by the authorities was made even more audible. Finally, the process of othering the space surrounding monuments to Soviet soldiers was influenced by the celebration of new political rituals in their vicinity. During the first post-war years there was a change in the so-called ideological layout of Polish towns. Ihis was achieved to a significant extent due to new monuments, among other devices. "Ihe ideological layout is a kind of interpretation of history—sometimes radically different from the preceding one—and it assumes being read through a specific prism. It denotes shaping the social memory, but also shaping the social oblivion as to the symbols recognized as alien and hostile. The town teaches us what is our and familiar, and what is foreign. About what is worth remembering, and what should be struck out from the past. The town is a symbolic scene, on which certain symbols are inscribed, while other become destroyed” (Zielinski 2007: 11). In this context, the monuments are seen as an integral part of the socio-historical structure of the town, of its history and culture. The Otherness of the monuments of the Red Army was deepened by the fact that they were imposed on the Polish society by the Soviet Army and the communist authorities on the basis of a top-down approach. The Soviet monuments, as the new symbols, not only did not gain common social approval, but they were also used by the communists to create ideologised and falsified memory. “By creating spaces for memory, monuments propagate the illusion of common memory” (Young 1993: 6). The monuments to Soviet soldiers replaced and contributed to the removal, and, finally, eradication from social memory of material representations of the former familiar (i.e. the monuments from before the Second Polish Republic), which embodied important national values and traditions. Conclusion ‘There are many reasons why man requires monuments. The fundamental question does not lie in what these monuments are like but in what they represent and why they are able to represent so differently, depending on when, how and who is looking at them. Images in their tenacious relationship with materiality possess the ability to constantly create and transform the world. In post-war Poland monuments to Red Army soldiers were supposed to provide a ‘tool’ with which to construct a new reality, to revise the pre-war order, to create new stereotypes; finally, to shape new categories and images of the familiar and the Other. It is certain that monuments ‘speak’ to viewers in a coded language. The ambiguity and multidimensionality of the language constitute its richness, while at the same time possessing power that is not entirely predictable. “Images are active players in the game of establishing and changing values. They are capable of introducing new values into the world and thus of threatening old ones. For better and for worse, human beings establish their collective, historical identity by creating around them a second nature composed of images which do not merely reflect the
