Communism Archives - Contested Histories

Peter Cvirkas Statue in Vilnius

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The statue for the Lithuanian writer Petras Cvirka was built not only because of his talent as a successful writer, but also due to his collaboration with the Soviet regime after the Soviet occupation in 1940. The new wave of discussions about memory, heritage objects in public spaces, and national identity started on a national level after the Restoration of Independence of Lithuania in 1990. Despite various opinions about the past of Lithuania, the narrative of creating a modern country took a solid position that was created by intellectuals and new-generation pro-Western liberal politicians who took the initiative to re-create the public spaces. Therefore, the taking down of Petras Cvirka’s statue in 2021 was a political action with no one-sided supportive opinion from the public.

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St. Vladimir Statue in Moscow

Paula — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

On November 4, 2016, a statue of Vladimir the Great or Saint Vladimir, as he is known in Russian, was unveiled by President Putin in Moscow during the millennium commemoration of Vladimir’s death (958–1015). Known as Volodymyr in Ukrainian, he is a major historical figure in both Russian and Ukrainian memory politics and understood, by each, to be the founder of their states. Upon its unveiling, Putin sought to emphasise Vladimir’s role as a uniter of the Slavic people, and implicitly placed Russia at its core. This enormous statue was evidently meant to rival the statue of the figure in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, which has been there since 1853. This case study examines the significance of this monument in the context of memory wars with Ukraine and as part of the Russian state’s discourse of a 1000-year-old Russia.

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Dolinka Museum for the Commemoration of Victims of Political Repression in Karaganda

Paula — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

The Karaganda Corrective Labour Camp (Karlag) was a Soviet forced labour camp located in the Karaganda region, in the central part of Kazakhstan, and operated between 1931 and 1959. The camp covered a vast area, at its largest, roughly the size of France. After its closure, the camp was left for the most part unfenced and unattended. The locals had reused many former camp buildings. After Kazakhstan gained independence, the government had little interest in commemorating former camps and also addressing the contentious Soviet legacy. In the late 2000s, an effort towards commemoration was made by the government with the creation of the two museums, Alzhir Museum and Karlag Museum in Dolinka. However, since then, the visitation levels have remained low, both for local and international tourists, arguably reflecting a lack of ownership and legitimacy given by other stakeholders, most importantly, local communities.

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Marshal Konev Statue in Prague

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 12:12:03 +0000

In the Spring of 2020, the Prague 6 Municipality removed the monument to Marshal Konev from Náměstí Interbrigády (International Brigade Square). The statue had a long history of contestation and was eventually removed in 2020 following a successful petition campaign the previous year. During these thirty years, many actors played a role in its fate, from civil and private citizens to high-ranking government officials in both the Czech Republic and other former socialist countries. The statue’s removal represents the culmination of a struggle between two readings of Konev: one that portrays him as a liberator from Nazi occupation and another that focuses on his involvement in communist-era control and repression. This case illustrates how contemporary Czech society reconciles with its Socialist and Soviet-era political heritage in juxtaposition to its current alliance with the West, and how a local symbolic and historic contested history can influence diplomatic relations.

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Victims of Political Repression Monument in Tayshet

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In the summer of 2020, a monument to the victims of Stalinist political repression was unveiled in the city of Tayshet in Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. On July 4, 2020, the monument was vandalised and defaced, making the inscription illegible. During Soviet rule, the Gulag camp Taishetlag was located near the city, making Tayshet a stop which all prisoners made on their journey to the Gulag. In the twenty-first century, President Vladimir Putin’s reconstruction of Stalin’s figure and Soviet patriotism provoked the emergence of many new monuments to Stalin and the vandalism of those commemorating victims. Monuments remembering the victims of the Stalinist era provide a physical and spatial rebuttal to heroic memories of Stalinism. This case analyses the ongoing clash between the unofficial rehabilitation of Stalin and the commemoration of victims of the Soviet system of repression, taking the monument in Tayshet as an example.

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Sighet Memorial in Sighetu Marmației

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 14:55:47 +0000

The Sighet Memorial is housed in a former Stalinist prison in Sighet that under Communist rule in Romania housed high profile political prisoners. The Memorial provides insight on the repression by communist regimes in Europe throughout the 20th century, including the resultant death and suffering experienced inside and outside the prison walls. This case study explores the memorialization of this period in the post-communist era and how the Memorial seeks to reshape Romanian collective memory.

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Boris Nemtsov Square in Prague

Contested Histories Admin — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

On February 27, 2016, several Czech citizens started a petition to rename Prague’s Under the Chestnuts Square, the site of Russia’s Embassy in the Czech Republic, in honour of the murdered Kremlin critic, Boris Nemtsov. The Prague City Council finalised the renaming on February 27, 2020. In response, the Russian Embassy changed its address to the nearby Coronation Street, which was renamed the Street of Ukrainian Heroes in 2022. The square’s renaming was met with local approval and spurred protests against Putin’s regime. It also inflamed tensions between the Czech Republic and Russia over the Kremlin’s foreign policy and the memory of Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia, likely contributing to the attacks on the Czech Embassy in Moscow in April 2021. This case study examines how the contested legacies of Communism in East-Central Europe influence contemporary politics, mapping the diplomatic dimensions of the struggle for public space.

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Bronze Soldier Statue in Tallinn

Jade — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 02:58:00 +0000

In late April 2007, a series of violent street protests involving arson and looting erupted over plans to relocate a bronze statue of a Red Army soldier from a park in central Tallinn to a military cemetery on the outskirts of the city. Known as the Bronze Nights, these protests exposed underlying tensions between Estonia’s ethnic Russian and Estonian communities, with consequences for diplomatic and trade relations between Tallinn and Moscow. This case study will highlight the lasting consequences of instrumentalizing historic legacies for short-term political gain and will review alternative responses that can help anticipate and avert unnecessary social and political tensions.

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Stalin Statue in Gori

Jade — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 13:56:49 +0000

The removal of the Stalin statue from the central square in Gori represents a top-down policy implementation approach to a contested historical monument. Such implementations of Georgia’s Freedom Charter illustrate the legal framework under which symbols, monuments and names of sites related to the Soviet past become reconfigured. However, positions differ on the fate of Soviet-era statues in Georgia. Stalin remains a controversial figure in modern Georgia, being regarded as a dictator, a great leader or simply part of Georgia’s history. Additionally, it is important to consider the statue’s significance for Gori’s tourism and the local economy. Currently, the future of the Stalin statue in Gori remains uncertain.

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Monument to Catherine II / Monument to the Founders of Odessa in Odesa

Contested Histories Admin — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 10:57:00 +0000

The Monuments to the Odessa Founders features prominently Catherine II of Russia and the men who assisted in the creation of the Russian Empire’s new southern frontier in Ukraine. The monument was inaugurated in 1894, but the start of communist rule in Ukraine prompted a series of removals and replacements of symbols of the past. After Ukraine’s independence in 1991, local leaders pushed for the restoration of the monument to Odesa’s city centre, sparking controversies, and questioning the identity politics of the southern port city. The monument was re-inaugurated in 2007, but it has since been criticized for its commemoration of a monarch who brought serfdom to Ukraine and for the utilization of the imperial past to circumvent national memory laws. This case study explores the entanglements between anti-Soviet narratives and a new understanding of colonial paradigms in Eastern Europe.

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