After the Cold War

Sculpted by Yevgeny Vuchetich (1908-74), the monument, whose upkeep was one of the Soviet Union’s stipulations for agreeing to German reunification, was officially unveiled on May 8th, 1949 at the height of the Cold War. Flanked by a series of frescoes glorifying the struggle of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War and bearing quotations from Joseph Stalin in Russian and German, Treptow overlooks a mass grave containing the remains of 5,000 Soviet soldiers who died during the final Battle of Berlin in spring 1945. Its symbolism casts the arrival of the Red Army as an act of fraternal liberation: Soviet heroes freeing captive populations from the grip of fascism.  In this way it stood as a constant reminder of a debt of gratitude. It was also deliberately selective. Distilling the war on the Eastern Front into a simple story of the good (the Soviet Union) against evil (Nazi Germany), the Treptow Monument conveniently overlooked the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 to focus the narrative on the military achievements of the Red Army.

Across the Eastern Bloc this message was asserted through monuments and ceremonies everywhere, though in practice there was scope for some variation as each regime incorporated the general theme into its own vision of national Communism. The one country where the Soviet master narrative was least flexibly imposed was East Germany,  largely because, given the direct competition with West Germany, this was the place where Cold War polarities were most acute. With this in mind a new identity was constructed for East Germany on a clean slate based upon anti-Nazism. Thus, East Germany preserved the concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen not as memorials to the Holocaust but in homage to Communist anti-fascism. Statues, sculpted in the socialist realist style, depicted male prisoners side by side with their Soviet liberators. No reference was made to Jews, Roma, homosexual and non-Communist victims in order to transmit a highly specific political message, namely that fascism and monopoly capitalism were responsible for war crimes and that the German working class, led by the German Communist party and allied to the Red Army, had heroically resisted Nazi rule at all levels. Taken together these two lessons underpinned the foundation of the East German state, articles of ideological faith that laid the basis for the country’s unyielding battle against international capitalism. 

The fall of Communism in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 led inevitably to the collapse of the Soviet master narrative. Monuments associated with the old regimes were either demolished or refurbished and imbued with an anti-Communist message. In the newly united Germany the former headquarters of the East German secret police, the Stasi, became a museum where visitors can explore the old interrogation cells and view exhibits of bugging devices and spy cameras hidden in books, plant pots and car doors. In Budapest, Memento Park, which houses statues and memorials from the communist period, opened in autumn 1993. It soon became one of the Hungarian capital’s major tourist attractions. The designer of the park, Ákos Eleõd Junior, was at pains not to replicate the thinking of the Communist dictatorship: 

This park is about dictatorship. And at the same time, because it can be talked about, described, built, this park is about democracy. After all, only democracy is able to give the opportunity to let us think freely about dictatorship. Or about democracy come to that. Or about anything! So, rather than simply melting the statues down they have become museum pieces from a lost world that makes the statue park the ultimate symbol of defeat: Communism reduced to theme park kitsch.

In Latvia, too, there has been a thorough re-evaluation of history. This followed the final break-up of the USSR, which led to the country regaining independence on September 6th, 1991. The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia 1940-91, which opened in Riga on July 1st, 1993, was a major statement about the recovery of a national identity that, in the words of the new museum guide, had been effaced by two totalitarian regimes, one Nazi and the other Stalinist. Indeed, since 1998 the government has included the museum as part of all official protocol visits by foreign heads of state. In this new journey of self-discovery the museum’s starting point is the desire to present a truthful account of the past; one that acknowledges Latvian suffering for past, present and future generations and the need for people to define their own national identity rather than one that has been crudely imposed or politically manipulated.

To this end the thrust of the museum’s narrative is anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet in equal measure. By reminding the world that Latvia, like the other two Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania, fell into the USSR’s grip after the signature of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, before being formally annexed in 1940, the museum sets out to underline the political symmetry between the two regimes. Yet, by equating Soviet Communism with Nazism, the Museum does not balk at including unpalatable facts about Latvian actions during the Second World War. There is no attempt to sanitise the past. Memories that do not fit into a story of heroic resistance to totalitarianism are included because, as Gundega Michel, the museum director, emphasises, history is not an ideological tool to be distorted as it was during the Soviet period:

The aim of the museum is to present the historical events as factually and as precisely as possible and to interpret them in an unbiased manner on the basis of current historical research. Our museum has been criticised as being too ‘wordy’, but our aim is to provide precise information about complex situations and avoid simplistic black and white – good and bad – conclusions and judgements. We wish to present history in terms of its effect on ordinary people.

Consequently, the display features images of the local population welcoming the Nazis in June 1941. It faces up to the participation of local police in the Holocaust, a central issue for the museum since there was no serious research into this during the Soviet period. It also confronts the role of Latvian volunteers in the German army. But in presenting all aspects of this difficult past the museum wants to rescue Latvian history from condescension and misunderstanding.   

The Stasi Museum in Berlin, the Statue Park in Budapest, the Museum of Occupation in Riga: all touch on themes that will be addressed in History Today’s short series in this and the following issue. Marking 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have invited three experts – Catherine Merridale on Russia, Paul Betts on Germany and Ed Dutton on the often overlooked example of Finland – to consider how the historical landscape in these three countries has been transformed by the end of the Cold War, examining how, in varying degrees, the collapse of Communism has altered perceptions of the past at all levels.

Martin Evans is Professor of Modern History at the University of Portsmouth