When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, so did many of its statues, often in giddy, nighttime topplings—most notably, the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the ruthless Soviet secret police. These were often joyous, cathartic events, quick and tangible symbols of the end of a brutal and moribund regime, when everything else was changing far more slowly. In Moscow, the statues were then dragged to a grassy lot next to the brutalist Central House of Artists on an island in the middle of the Moscow River. For years, they lay there on the ground, a kind of graveyard of Lenins and Soviet crests and anonymous workers and peasants shorn of their pedestals. In recent years, the city of Moscow has turned them upright—and into an outdoor sculpture garden where the statues can be seen for the ghosts that they are. (I have walked past the garden many times, but found it hard to take interest in what were essentially tombstones with no graves beneath them: Unlike the long-overdue removal of Confederate statues, the removal of Soviet statues in Russia proved superficial and the celebration premature. The statues were yanked down, but the Soviet state didn’t really go anywhere; even the melody of the national anthem is the same.)
In 1997, Taiwan did a similar thing with the statues of nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Jing-guo. Their likenesses were put into a green park on the bank of a lake, the Cihu Memorial Statues Park. Each statue has a description of where it originally stood. These parks deprive the statues of their context and their power; they may look like a brutal dictator, but here they are just stone.
There’s a reason statues can rouse such angry passions. They are designed to evoke emotion and memory in monumental terms. That’s the whole point. But they are not just symbols of what a society has decided is important. Often, they also serve as embodiments of the state, reminders of its presence even when one of its enforcers can’t be there. A statue can be an inanimate chunk of rock or metal in loco parentis. The Confederate statues, many of which went up well after the Civil War, were reminders of who was in charge, symbols not of an old master, but a new one: Jim Crow. Which is why statues can often become flashpoints of conflict, as they did in Eastern Ukraine in the wake of the Maidan revolution and Russian invasion of 2014. Ukrainians gleefully toppled Lenins all over their country, eager to shed their Soviet, Moscow-dominated past, and to move into the future. At the height of the Arab Spring, protestors in places like Syria defaced and brought down statues to the still-living dictators they couldn’t always topple.
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