"There is nothing more inconspicuous than a monument," said the Austrian writer Robert Musil a hundred years ago. From the ruins of another empire, Russia's, I would add: There is nothing more conspicuous than an absent monument.
Monuments compose the body of a nation on display. By looking at monuments, we feel how a nation-state affirms its continuity. When revolutions disrupt this continuity, they wreak violence against monuments. As the example of Saddam Hussein teaches us anew, to overturn a monument is easier than to try a dictator. Post-revolutionary periods, however, allow for more variety. Sometimes, new monuments are erected. Sometimes, old monuments return to their original spots. Sometimes, monuments are in absentia, like professors on sabbatical.
While Holocaust deniers have been purged from German universities, Russian universities employ a number of professors of Russian history who conspicuously maintain the Gulag's absence from their lectures. Though terror in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia created many millions of victims, the memories of these events are vastly different. The most arresting but unrecognized of all post-Soviet monuments to the Gulag is the 500 ruble banknote, issued in the late 1990's and widely used today.
Seemingly a testament to the nation's proud history, this banknote carries a hidden message. It depicts the Solovki monastery, a historical complex on an island in the White Sea, which also served as the earliest and one of the most important camps in the Gulag. Local historians at Solovki believe that the atypical cupolas illustrated on the note date the picture to the end of the 1920's, the time of the camp's peak development.
The design raises some challenging questions. Is this one of those monuments that has been erected not by artists but by critics, who produce meaning not through creation but through interpretation? Were officials of the Ministry of Finance being deliberately subversive? Or is the choice of picture on the banknote a symptom of psychological trauma, an unconscious but realistic manifestation of the work of mourning?
The work of mourning, to use Freud's formula, is continuous. But symmetrical evil does not mean symmetrical memorialization. There are plenty of memorials on the sites of German concentration camps, and new ones are continually added. In Russia, only two Gulag sites, in Solovki and in Perm, have small museums that show conditions in the camps, the techniques of torture and murder, the documents, and the portraits. In some cases, monuments are erected not on the former murder sites, as in Germany, but near them.
Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.
Subscribe Now
This pattern represents not the old regime's eradication, but its coexistence with the new one. Even such proximate memory is far from being the rule in Russia. There is not a single plaque commemorating the Leningrad KGB's victims near the site of their suffering. Such a monument is also notably absent from the vicinity of the Kremlin. The museum on Solovki Island fills just a few rooms inside the functioning monastery. Although about one million people were incarcerated there, there is only one heartbreaking plaque on a shed, which reads, "The children's barrack of the Solovki Camp."
Some local museums display fascinating objects. In the Kargopol museum, for example, stands a clay pitcher, presented to the museum by the descendants of a guard who appropriated a prisoner's parcel - a pitcher full of honey. In such exhibits, however, it is impossible to find answers to the most obvious questions: How many prisoners passed through this camp? How many died here, and when? Who were the administrators, guards, and executioners?
Close to the Belomorkanal, one of the Gulag's major construction sites, a large mass grave was uncovered at Sandarmokh. The site is a pine forest near an old highway, distinguished by the small, regular depressions in the earth that are characteristic of such graves. The Memorial Society meticulously compared their archeological findings with the "shooting protocols" kept in the KGB's archives. The protocols never mention names, but they give the number of those who were shot on a specific date, classified by gender, e.g. 20 men, seven women. By matching the number of skeletons and their gender, every "shooting protocol" was identified with a certain grave.
About 9,000 people were shot at Sandarmokh between 1937-1938. Today, a wooden pole marks each mass grave. Designed as a local symbol of mourning, these poles, with their sharply angled roofs, remind viewers either of a peasant cross or a human figure with hands raised in prayer. Sandarmokh is the most important, and best developed, Russian site of memory. Unfortunately, it is unknown even to neighbors as close as the Scandinavians.
Two better-known memorials in Moscow and St. Petersburg consist of granite stones taken from Solovki. In St. Petersburg, the stone is complemented with inscriptions, such as "To the victims of Communism." (This plaque has been vandalized many times, the last with a graffito in red oil paint, "Too few were shot.")
Here we have memory converted to drama. But Russian memory is also subject to Western-style postmodernist mockery. A recent fashion in St. Petersburg are restaurants with names such as "Lenin's Mating Call," "USSR," and "Russian Kitsch," which has frescos showing collective farmers socializing with American Indians while Leonid Brezhnev, resembling Frank Sinatra, gives a speech to a stone-age tribe.
Far more than Nazism, Communism belongs to our common European heritage. The memory of its victims is not only a national, but also a European responsibility. As generations pass, monuments evolve from a medium of mourning to instruments of education. The work of memory is hard, expensive, and fragile. Monuments move back and forth. Capitals may be renamed. Banknotes expire. Everything may be mocked and change meaning.
Even mummies are mobile. In 1961, the mummy of Stalin was observed striding out of the Mausoleum in Red Square. Lenin's corpse remains there, but his departure is expected. This should be a European event.
To have unlimited access to our content including in-depth commentaries, book reviews, exclusive interviews, PS OnPoint and PS The Big Picture, please subscribe
The escalating war in the Middle East must be understood in a broader context. The fact that the Iranian regime felt emboldened to risk a direct strike on Israel attests to a changing world order in which Western power is increasingly open to challenge.
considers the implications of Iran’s unprecedented decision to launch a direct strike on Israeli territory.
"There is nothing more inconspicuous than a monument," said the Austrian writer Robert Musil a hundred years ago. From the ruins of another empire, Russia's, I would add: There is nothing more conspicuous than an absent monument.
Monuments compose the body of a nation on display. By looking at monuments, we feel how a nation-state affirms its continuity. When revolutions disrupt this continuity, they wreak violence against monuments. As the example of Saddam Hussein teaches us anew, to overturn a monument is easier than to try a dictator. Post-revolutionary periods, however, allow for more variety. Sometimes, new monuments are erected. Sometimes, old monuments return to their original spots. Sometimes, monuments are in absentia, like professors on sabbatical.
While Holocaust deniers have been purged from German universities, Russian universities employ a number of professors of Russian history who conspicuously maintain the Gulag's absence from their lectures. Though terror in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia created many millions of victims, the memories of these events are vastly different. The most arresting but unrecognized of all post-Soviet monuments to the Gulag is the 500 ruble banknote, issued in the late 1990's and widely used today.
Seemingly a testament to the nation's proud history, this banknote carries a hidden message. It depicts the Solovki monastery, a historical complex on an island in the White Sea, which also served as the earliest and one of the most important camps in the Gulag. Local historians at Solovki believe that the atypical cupolas illustrated on the note date the picture to the end of the 1920's, the time of the camp's peak development.
The design raises some challenging questions. Is this one of those monuments that has been erected not by artists but by critics, who produce meaning not through creation but through interpretation? Were officials of the Ministry of Finance being deliberately subversive? Or is the choice of picture on the banknote a symptom of psychological trauma, an unconscious but realistic manifestation of the work of mourning?
The work of mourning, to use Freud's formula, is continuous. But symmetrical evil does not mean symmetrical memorialization. There are plenty of memorials on the sites of German concentration camps, and new ones are continually added. In Russia, only two Gulag sites, in Solovki and in Perm, have small museums that show conditions in the camps, the techniques of torture and murder, the documents, and the portraits. In some cases, monuments are erected not on the former murder sites, as in Germany, but near them.
Subscribe to PS Digital
Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.
Subscribe Now
This pattern represents not the old regime's eradication, but its coexistence with the new one. Even such proximate memory is far from being the rule in Russia. There is not a single plaque commemorating the Leningrad KGB's victims near the site of their suffering. Such a monument is also notably absent from the vicinity of the Kremlin. The museum on Solovki Island fills just a few rooms inside the functioning monastery. Although about one million people were incarcerated there, there is only one heartbreaking plaque on a shed, which reads, "The children's barrack of the Solovki Camp."
Some local museums display fascinating objects. In the Kargopol museum, for example, stands a clay pitcher, presented to the museum by the descendants of a guard who appropriated a prisoner's parcel - a pitcher full of honey. In such exhibits, however, it is impossible to find answers to the most obvious questions: How many prisoners passed through this camp? How many died here, and when? Who were the administrators, guards, and executioners?
Close to the Belomorkanal, one of the Gulag's major construction sites, a large mass grave was uncovered at Sandarmokh. The site is a pine forest near an old highway, distinguished by the small, regular depressions in the earth that are characteristic of such graves. The Memorial Society meticulously compared their archeological findings with the "shooting protocols" kept in the KGB's archives. The protocols never mention names, but they give the number of those who were shot on a specific date, classified by gender, e.g. 20 men, seven women. By matching the number of skeletons and their gender, every "shooting protocol" was identified with a certain grave.
About 9,000 people were shot at Sandarmokh between 1937-1938. Today, a wooden pole marks each mass grave. Designed as a local symbol of mourning, these poles, with their sharply angled roofs, remind viewers either of a peasant cross or a human figure with hands raised in prayer. Sandarmokh is the most important, and best developed, Russian site of memory. Unfortunately, it is unknown even to neighbors as close as the Scandinavians.
Two better-known memorials in Moscow and St. Petersburg consist of granite stones taken from Solovki. In St. Petersburg, the stone is complemented with inscriptions, such as "To the victims of Communism." (This plaque has been vandalized many times, the last with a graffito in red oil paint, "Too few were shot.")
Here we have memory converted to drama. But Russian memory is also subject to Western-style postmodernist mockery. A recent fashion in St. Petersburg are restaurants with names such as "Lenin's Mating Call," "USSR," and "Russian Kitsch," which has frescos showing collective farmers socializing with American Indians while Leonid Brezhnev, resembling Frank Sinatra, gives a speech to a stone-age tribe.
Far more than Nazism, Communism belongs to our common European heritage. The memory of its victims is not only a national, but also a European responsibility. As generations pass, monuments evolve from a medium of mourning to instruments of education. The work of memory is hard, expensive, and fragile. Monuments move back and forth. Capitals may be renamed. Banknotes expire. Everything may be mocked and change meaning.
Even mummies are mobile. In 1961, the mummy of Stalin was observed striding out of the Mausoleum in Red Square. Lenin's corpse remains there, but his departure is expected. This should be a European event.