🎯 Aim: To understand the complexity of public memory when dealing with the communist past and competing memories in society in the post-communist period.

🗒️ Description: As a continuation of the previous activity (2), split the class into pairs. Give the students 10 minutes to discuss in pairs the overall question: is it important to preserve public memory of the heritage of the communist regime after 1989?

Gather as a class and discuss their opinions for 20 minutes. Emphasize the persistence of public memory when dealing with the communist regime and the existence of competing memories in post-communist times.

To encourage participation, teachers can use the “Four corners” strategy. This strategy provides a structure in which students present their viewpoint about a statement or claim. Every member of the class takes part and gives their opinion in the discussion which follows. It can be used several times in a lesson to show changing opinions as more knowledge is gained. It can help students to think through and justify their opinions before a written task. The basic strategy:

• Identify the four corners of the classroom as ‘strongly disagree’, ‘disagree, ‘agree’, ‘strongly agree’.
• Give students a statement or assertion and ask them to go to the corner that reflects their viewpoint. Some students may stand between corners and that is OK. It is likely that students will automatically introduce nuance by standing between corners. Do not discourage this but ask students to articulate their thoughts.
• Ask students to explain the reasoning for their choice of position. Give all students a chance to shift if they are persuaded by others’ arguments.
• By articulating their reasoning and hearing the arguments of others, students are able to deepen and broaden their discussion of topics. Students from each corner can respectfully question and challenge the views of those in other corners.

Additional information for teachers:

Bulgaria: Teachers can use the following video materials on the topic of the lesson:

1) Episode 1: Symbols of power: the Mausoleum, State Security and Fear (in Bulgarian, with English subtitles)³. A short film about the Mausoleum with writer Georgi Gospodinov.

2) In the footsteps of a revolution (the whole tour)⁴

Lithuania: The case of Lithuania – Grūtas park

Monuments from the Soviet era can be treated in different ways. After the restoration of independence in Lithuania, various Soviet sculptures and monuments, especially those depicting communist political figures, began to be rapidly destroyed. The dismantled monuments were abandoned in warehouses, basements, and garages, as no formal procedure was established for the storage of such monuments and there was no clear decision on what to do with such sculptures; whether to demolish them or rebrand them. Some people, especially those who experienced Soviet repression, wanted all the sculptures representing socialist ideology to be destroyed. They feared that preserving such sculptures and monuments might lead to their use in communist nostalgia and propaganda. These people believe that socialist sculptures should not be considered works of art, but only as useless relics of an unpleasant past. For them, the demolition of all monuments marks their liberation from a hated system. Another group of people wanted Soviet monuments to be preserved, kept in a museum, and used as source for teaching history. Formal monuments might still have the status of cultural objects, so destroying them would not have been so straightforward.

In 1998, the Ministry of Culture announced a tender for an exhibition of dismantled Soviet-era monumental sculptures. It was won by a public institution run by a local businessman, Viliumas Malinauskas. During the Soviet era, Malinauskas worked as the chairman of a collective farm. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he established a successful mushroom and berry business. According to Malinauskas, he never belonged to the Communist Party and did not support the Soviet regime. The idea to establish a park of socialist sculptures – an open-air museum – came to him when he saw the head of a Lenin sculpture lying on the ground in the yard of an art factory in Vilnius. 20 hectares of swampy forest by the village of Grūtas was dedicated to the Open-Air Museum of Socialist Sculptures. It is located near the resort of Druskininkai and 125 km from the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. Preparations for the exhibition started in 1999. The park was officially opened in 2001 and features about 100 different sculptures.

The aim of Grūtas Park is to preserve icons of Soviet ideology and reveal their negative roles. These socialist monuments, removed from their original context, no longer look as majestic as they did before and allow visitors to see works of Soviet propaganda in a different light. However, the Grūtas Park Museum still has an ambivalent reception in Lithuania. Even though the museum is successful and visited by many tourists from all over the world, people who wanted these socialist sculptures to be destroyed criticise the Grūtas Park Museum. They argue that the crimes of the people immortalized in the monuments are not visible in the way those socialist sculptures are exhibited. For them the establishment of Grūtas Park represents a restoration of these Soviet monuments. They believe the Park may encourage nostalgia for rather than rejection of these Soviet monuments and the ideology they represent. As a result, these socialist monuments still perform an ideological function even after the collapse of the system. Young people who have not experienced the Soviet era or foreigners from the West cannot understand the concept of the museum as they do not know the whole context and they perceive Grūtas Park as a museum of Soviet relics, as entertainment rather than a space for education. Thus, removing socialist sculptures and installing them in an open-air museum could be seen as a way to commemorate the socialist past, as well as a questionable means of attracting tourists, rather than a way of reflecting the difficulty of the past experiences they represent.

Poland:

A debate about the material traces of the communist regime in public spaces has been held in Poland as well. Numerous monuments were destroyed, immediately following 1989, as unwanted symbols of the totalitarian regime. This was the fate of the monument to Feliks Dzierżyński, a Polish communist and one of Lenin’s close collaborators. This statue was located on one of the main squares in Warsaw. It was demolished and replaced later by the sculpture of a romantic poet, Juliusz Słowacki.

At its demolition in November 1989, which became a symbolic public event, Varsovians cheered when the statue of “bloody Felix”, having lost its head, fell onto the pavement.

Until recently there were still hundreds of communist monuments standing in Polish towns. Such monuments were meant to be removed under the special Decommunization Act which was passed in 2016. This Act was intended to remove the communist names of roads, streets, bridges, and squares. In 2017, the Polish parliament adopted an amendment, extending decommunization to include, inter alia, monuments, obelisks, sculptures, statues, stones, and commemorative plaques. Local governments had until the end of March 2018 to remove them, after which local governments (voivodes) would undertake the process of dismantling this communist era infrastructure.

Many monuments were demolished or removed during that time, very often despite opposition from some parts of the public or representatives of local leftwing parties. Most often such statues were not destroyed but transferred to other places, like themed museums or open-air ethnographic museums, such as the Museum of the Polish People’s Republic (PPR) in Silesia.⁵ The “relics of the PPR” from Strzelce Krajeńskie were removed and will find a place in an open-air ethnographic museum in the Surmówka, in the Warmian-Masurian region, north of Poland.⁶

More information for monuments in Poland: Project “Monuments of Remembrance 1918-2018”.⁷