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Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet–EraMonuments and Post–Soviet National Identity in MoscowBenjamin Forest a & Juliet Johnson ba Dartmouth Collegeb Loyola University , ChicagoPublished online: 15 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Benjamin Forest & Juliet Johnson (2002) Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet–Era Monumentsand Post–Soviet National Identity in Moscow, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92:3, 524-547, DOI:10.1111/1467-8306.00303

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Annals of the Association of American Geographers

, 92(3), 2002, pp. 524–547© 2002 by Association of American GeographersPublished by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet

National Identity in Moscow

Benjamin Forest* and Juliet Johnson**

*Department of Geography, Dartmouth College**Department of Political Science, Loyola University Chicago

This article explores the formation of post-Soviet Russian national identity through a study of political strugglesover key Soviet-era monuments and memorials in Moscow during the “critical juncture” in Russian history from1991 through 1999. We draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Pierre Nora to explain how competition amongpolitical elites for control over the sites guided their transformation from symbols of the Soviet Union into symbolsof Russia. By co-opting, contesting, ignoring, or removing certain types of monuments through both physical trans-formations and “commemorative maintenance,” Russian political elites engaged in a symbolic dialogue with eachother and with the public in an attempt to gain prestige, legitimacy, and influence. We make this argument throughcase studies of four monument sites in Moscow: Victory Park (Park Pobedy), the Lenin Mausoleum, the formerExhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy (VDNKh), and the Park of Arts (Park Isskustv). In thearticle, we first discuss the role of symbolic capital in the transformation of national identity. Following an exami-nation of the political struggles over places of memory in Moscow, we analyze the interplay between elite and pop-ular uses of the monuments, exploring the extent to which popular “reading” of the sites limits the ability of elitesto manipulate their meaning. We conclude by looking at the Russian case in comparative perspective and exploringthe reasons behind the dearth of civic monuments in post-Soviet Russia.

Key Words: monuments and memorials, na-tional identity, places of memory, Russia, symbolic capital.

The wheel of history has turned 180 degrees as Moscow be-came Russia’s first city to start sailing away from utopia andtoward the nation’s rebirth . . . This means that a wholelayer of national culture—the lost toponymy created byour ancestors throughout the centuries—has come back.

—Zhigailov (1996, 162).

1

he central memorial commemorating the victoryover Nazism at Poklonnaia Gora in Moscowstrikes one with visceral force. A huge dragon

covered with swastikas, curled beneath a towering obe-lisk adorned with Nike, the goddess of victory, engages inmortal struggle with a statue of St. George on horseback(Figure 1). It forms the climactic center of the Victory Park(Park Pobedy) complex, which also contains a museum,three religious shrines, an expansive plaza, and othersmaller memorials. This imposing monument incorpo-rates some of the most enduring symbols of evil, conflict,and victory in the Western cultural imagination. Indeed,from 1945 through the mid-1980s, World War II (whichRussians call the Great Patriotic War) was perhaps thesingle most powerful element in the constitutive nationalnarrative of the USSR. In short, memorials to this warwere among the most potent sites for the construction of

T

a Soviet national identity. Yet this monument site, orig-inally chosen in 1957 under Khrushchev and planned dur-ing the Brezhnev era, was completed by the Moscow citygovernment in 1995 as a site glorifying Russian nationalidentity. The complex histories of Victory Park and othermonument sites in post-Soviet Moscow raise a numberof questions concerning both the nature of contempo-rary Russian nationalism and the relationships amonghistorical memory, national identity, and monuments.

Although monuments are powerful because they ap-pear to be permanent markers of memory and history,they require both physical and symbolic maintenance, orwhat Nora (1996, 7) describes as “commemorative vigi-lance.” In periods of normal politics, such commemora-tive vigilance typically occurs in undramatic, uncontrover-sial, and routine ways. Yet after the failed coup attemptof August 1991 and the subsequent breakup of the SovietUnion, Russia experienced a “critical juncture” in its his-tory that fundamentally challenged every aspect of Rus-sian identity—political, economic, and national. Duringthis period, Russia faced the immense task of forging anational identity distinct from the Soviet Union andthus redefining itself as a nation rather than as the centerof a territorial or ideological empire. Such critical junctures

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 525

bring the politics of memory—and of monuments in par-ticular—to the fore.

As such, the analysis of

lieux de mémoire

(places ofmemory) provides an ideal way to trace underlying con-tinuities and discontinuities in national identity poli-tics.

2

Following Nora’s (1996) pioneering study of Frenchplaces of memory, geographers have produced a rich cor-pus of research on monuments, memorials, and nationalidentity. We extend these works by emphasizing the im-portance of elite conflict over the (re)construction of na-tional monuments at critical junctures in history.

Existing monuments and other places of memory canexperience one of three possible fates during these rareand significant critical junctures: Co-opted/Glorified,Disavowed, or Contested. Co-opted/Glorified monumentsare maintained or further exulted. Disavowed sites areliterally or symbolically erased from the landscape eitherthrough active destruction or through neglect by thestate. Contested monuments remain the objects of polit-ical conflict, neither clearly glorified nor disavowed. Thechoices that political actors make about which existingsites are and are not “usable”—and the inclusiveness ofthe debate—reveal a great deal about changing officialconceptions of national identity and the nation-buildingprocess. In the transition from Soviet to Russian nation-alism, for example, the style and design of official monu-ments reflected much continuity between Russia and theUSSR. Although the bulk of Victory Park was built afterthe fall of the Soviet Union, the memorial replicates the

gigantic scale and overt symbolism characteristic of So-viet memorials. The story of post-Soviet Russian identityis, however, a complex one; Russians have not simply re-produced Soviet imagery. The addition of religious sitesat Victory Park, for example, was not envisioned by itsnominally atheist Soviet-era architects. In other cases,the meaning of Soviet monuments, memorials, and mu-seums has been significantly altered by changing thecomposition of the sites or by moving monuments to dif-ferent locations.

We argue that the physical transformation of places ofmemory during critical junctures reflects the struggleamong political elites for the “symbolic capital” embod-ied in and represented by these sites (Bourdieu 1977, 1990).By co-opting, contesting, ignoring, or removing certaintypes of monuments, political elites engage in a symbolicdialogue with each other and with the public in an attemptto gain prestige, legitimacy, and influence. We developthis argument through an analysis of Soviet-era monu-ment and memorial sites in contemporary Russia. In cer-tain cases, competition for this symbolic capital encour-aged elites to draw on representations of the nation alreadyembedded in powerful existing monuments and memori-als, transforming them from symbols of the Soviet Unioninto symbols of Russia. This elite competition also tendedto exclude popular participation in the memorializationprocess, with civil society having little say in the ulti-mate fates of Soviet-era monument sites. These trends,in turn, contributed to the persistence of authoritarianand imperial representations of the Russian nation.

This article examines the critical juncture in Russianhistory from 1991 through 1999, during which rival po-litical elites had the greatest opportunity to develop andattempt to impose their visions of Russian national iden-tity on the symbolic landscape of the capital, Moscow.The material and data for this research, gathered princi-pally during fieldwork in Moscow in July–August 1999and July 2001, include: Russian-language archival docu-ments, newspaper articles, and books; field observation,museum exhibitions, and interviews; and a set of surveysadministered to Russian-speaking visitors at selectedmonument sites. Our field research focused on threeprominent places of memory in Moscow: Victory Park(Co-opted/Glorified), the Lenin Mausoleum (Contested);and the former Exhibition of the Achievements of theNational Economy, or VDNKh (Disavowed). We alsoincluded a fourth site, the Park of Arts (Park Isskustv),which displayed numerous transplanted Soviet-era po-litical statues.

In the remainder of this article, we first develop ourargument about the role of monuments and symboliccapital in the formation and transformation of national

Figure 1. St. George and the Dragon at Victory Park.

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526 Forest and Johnson

identity. Following an examination of the political strug-gles over places of memory in Moscow, we analyze the in-terplay between elite and popular uses of the monuments,exploring the extent to which the public’s “reading” ofthe sites limits the ability of elites to manipulate theirmeaning and to control their symbolic capital. Finally,we discuss the Russian case in comparative perspectiveand explore the reasons behind the dearth of civic mon-uments in post-Soviet Russia.

National Identity and Symbolic Capital

Our characterization of nationalism and nationalidentity draws heavily on the constructivist school of na-tionalism (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Anderson1991). This approach argues that nations and national-ism are relatively recent innovations tied to the rise ofindustrial capitalism, and that states and elites activelycreate national identity around important symbolic eventsand ideas. Common language and written texts play aparticularly important role in the creation of nationalidentity, both by facilitating the spread of nationalisticideas and by creating a sense of solidarity. In general, na-tionalistic movements assert the existence of a unifiedpolitical community—a nation—with a distinct histori-cal narrative, cultural practices, language, ancestry, andterritorial home. Although nationalists proclaim the an-cient and continuous history of these characteristics,they are primarily contemporary inventions created inpart to serve a particular political end—the formation ofa nation-state. Consequently, nations and nationalismtypically have a contradictory relationship with his-tory: National movements are of thoroughly modernorigin, but their political coherence and social powerrest on historical events and figures. To motivate polit-ical action and to create a sense of solidarity, national-ists self-consciously create the myth of an ancient,timeless nation, and may even come to believe in itthemselves.

Official memorials, monuments, and museums play aunique role in the creation of national identity becausethey reflect how political elites choose to represent thenation publicly. By erecting memorials in public space,states and interest groups attempt to define the historicalfigures that become national heroes and establish thehistorical incidents that become the formative events ofa nation’s identity (Johnson 1995; Withers 1996; Atkin-son and Cosgrove 1998; Levinson 1998). In short, theyprovide an elite representation of the imagined commu-nity of the nation. However, by honoring, profaning, andoccasionally destroying these monuments, the public

may take collective action to “speak back” to the stateand redefine a nation’s history and identity (Harvey1979). Such popular responses may be in the form ofroutine participation, or in episodic and spontaneousaction. For example, Till (1999) describes the conflictsamong the four groups (politicians, victims, historicalexperts, and local citizens’ groups) that negotiated overthe creation and meaning of the redesigned Neue Wachememorial in Berlin. In contrast, the widespread, sponta-neous physical destruction of the Berlin Wall and the oc-cupation of Tiananmen Square in 1989 provide some ofthe most dramatic examples of the public “speakingback” to the state (Hershkovitz 1993). Nonetheless, po-litical elites generally have far greater power than doesthe public to shape the physical and symbolic representa-tion of national identity.

In order to move beyond the semiotics of individualmonuments, our analysis draws on works that interpretlandscapes as texts (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Duncanand Duncan 1988; Duncan 1990; Cosgrove 1998). Thisperspective suggests how the symbolic meanings of bothphysical and represented landscapes are deliberately ma-nipulated to advance political interests, and how onemay interpret landscapes as a reflection of those inter-ests.

3

Conflict can arise over both the design of individ-ual monuments and their placement. Elites can alter thesymbolic meaning of a site by modifying the particulardesign of a monument or memorial or by altering the pat-tern and arrangement of and relationships among differ-ent monuments. In both cases, they draw on particularsymbolic vocabularies to express the meaning of monu-ments and monument sites. The imagery of good and evilused in the monuments at Victory Park is only one suchexample of this practice.

Why are places of memory used to create politicalcommunities, to raise national consciousness, and to actas proxies of power for elites and political factions; andwhy do conflicts over them escalate to such heights? Cer-tain artifacts and events—such as dead bodies, gravesites,and burial ceremonies—have unique symbolic power be-cause they invoke a sense of timelessness, awe, fear, anduncertainty (Verdery 1999, 23–53). The power to tran-scend time, to bring historical events and personalitiesinto the present, makes such objects especially effectivein mobilizing national movements. Yet not all monu-ments and memorials include bodies, or even commem-orate lethal events. Moreover, as a practical matter theyonly modify land use in a limited area, and do not tangi-bly affect more standard measures of political power. Toexplain the apparently irrational significance of monu-ments and memorials, we develop Verdery’s (1999, 33)observation that “symbolic capital” is essential to political

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 527

transformations. The objectively disproportionate in-vestment of time, money, and resources in monumentscan be understood as conflicts over the accumulation,capture, and use of symbolic capital by political elites.

Bourdieu (1977, 1990) introduced the concept ofsymbolic capital in his analysis of social relationships inprecapitalist, agrarian societies, although the idea hassubsequently been applied more broadly to political con-flicts and the built environment (Dovey 1992; Harrison1995; McCann 1995). In essence, Bourdieu argues thatrelationships such as gift-giving, marriage, and couveelabor cannot be properly understood as purely economicexchanges. Although such interactions have an eco-nomic component (e.g., an exchange of material, money,or capital), participants do not understand or treat themin terms of market logic. The “misrecognition” of eco-nomic exchanges is not due to ignorance or mistakes.Rather, this misrecognition plays a fundamental roleboth in maintaining the social order and (for individu-als) in competition for social status and recognition.

4

So-cial actors are fully aware of the economic consequencesof their interactions and may nonetheless accept objec-tive economic losses if their symbolic capital is at risk. Insuch cases, power within a family and community is de-rived and represented by the accumulation of status,honor, and prestige, rather than by material wealth. The“exchange” of the symbolic capital not only disguises po-tentially disruptive economic relationships, but also con-stitutes the most significant kind of value.

Bourdieu’s (1997, 1990) principal concern is with in-terpersonal relationships and social status, although heties symbolic capital closely to the web of practices, un-derstandings, and structures (

habitus

) that sustains andconstitutes particular societies. He also suggests, however,that symbolic capital is used by organized groups and in-stitutions to advance what he (1990, 108) terms “offi-cialization”: “Officialization is the process whereby thegroup (or those who dominate it) teaches itself andmasks from itself its own truth, binds itself by a publicprofession which sanctions and imposes what it utters . . .[and contributes] to the maintenance of the social orderfrom which it derives its power.” Political groups withthe greatest symbolic capital and those most adept at ma-nipulating the rules and understandings governing theexchange of symbolic capital are more successful thanothers in advancing their agendas and projects. As withcompetition among individuals, these interests are notlimited to economic gain—or, in this case, politicalpower—but to the creation and maintenance of a partic-ular worldview (e.g., the character of the Russian nation).In short, the accumulation of symbolic capital is not sim-ply the means to an end (power), but an end in itself.

Political struggles over symbolic capital become in-creasingly salient during critical junctures, where dra-matic circumstances call existing political, economic,and social arrangements into question (see Krasner 1984;Collier and Collier 1991). Not only do critical juncturesloosen the normal, inertia-bound, path-dependent tiesamong and within political and economic institutions,but they create the possibility for significant redefini-tions of national history and identity as well. Powerfulpolitical actors thus have a rare chance to impress theirconceptions of the national character onto the publiclandscape, and in doing so assert their right to lead thenation and the state into the new era.

However, these critical junctures are both temporallyand spatially limited. After a short period of politicalstruggle and national self-reflection, institutions and iden-tities crystallize again in an altered form and become evermore difficult to challenge. Similarly, the most intenseand rapid change usually happens in a state’s core cities,and especially in the capital. Elite-driven changes in thesymbolic landscape will, therefore, tend to occur earlierand more radically in core cities, and less or occasionallynot at all in smaller towns and rural areas far from thecenter.

5

Moreover, while critical junctures create oppor-tunities for fundamental change, the end results may notbe so dramatic and will vary across institutions and issue-areas (Johnson 2001). Creation of the new inevitably in-volves contingent recombination and incorporation ofthe old, in a process Stark and Bruszt (1998) have termed“bricolage” (cf. Levi-Straus 1966).

The dismantling of the Soviet Union and its East Eu-ropean empire, the discrediting of the command econ-omy, and the repudiation of the one-party communiststate forced a profound rearrangement and reconceptual-ization of political, economic, and identity relationshipsthroughout East Europe and Eurasia. As in earlier nationalmovements, asserting national identity and cultivating asense of the sacred by rewriting history and manipulatinghistorical artifacts has been central to the legitimacy ofpostcommunist regimes (Verdery 1999; Suny 1999–2000).This is true in a fairly straightforward way in former So-viet client states in East Europe, and perhaps more re-markably in former Soviet republics in the Caucasus andCentral Asia such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan,and Uzbekistan. This same phenomenon is at work inpost-Soviet Russia as well, albeit with a nationalism thathas a more complex relationship to the Soviet period.

For centuries, Russia’s national identity rested on itsposition at the center of a geographical and ideologicalempire, a view that Soviet leaders easily adopted andadapted after the October Revolution. As a result, Rus-sian and Soviet identities were closely intertwined. The

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conceptual relationship between the two entities becameincreasingly complex, however, during the political ma-neuvers leading to the disintegration of the USSR. Beforethe late 1980s, the Soviet Union maintained “structuralasymmetries” with the Russian Soviet Federal SocialistRepublic (RSFSR), designed to suppress a sense of Rus-sian national identity separate from the USSR (Dunlop1993; Kaiser 1994). Although the USSR’s center of powerwas clearly in Russia, unlike the other Soviet republicsthe RSFSR did not have separate, republic-level social,cultural, and scientific institutions until Boris Yeltsin’selection as chairman of the RSFSR’s Supreme Soviet in1990. Indeed, challenging the conflation of Russian andSoviet identity became an increasingly important part ofYeltsin’s bid for power against Mikhail Gorbachev andthe Soviet central government.

Yeltsin was ultimately successful in achieving Russiansovereignty, and along with it the disintegration of theUSSR. However, as Smith (1999, 8) observes, “[B]ecauseRussians have throughout recent history been used toidentifying with such a larger homeland, either in theform of the Tsarist empire or the Soviet Union, manyhave found it difficult to adjust to the loss of that home-land. Consequently, the geographical imagination ofwhat and wherein lies Russia’s homeland becomes farless clear-cut.” The demoralizing, destabilizing economicdislocation and loss of international status that accom-panied the transformation further complicated the issueof identity for Russians. Therefore, after the USSR’s dis-solution destroyed the geographical basis for Soviet iden-tity, Russia engaged in an intensive search for a “new,”post-Soviet identity and for a “usable” past.

During this critical juncture, Russians considered awide range of possible identities incorporating variouscombinations of ethnic, imperial, and civic nationalisms.The first, or ethnic ideal, sees Russia primarily as an ex-clusive political community defined by language, religion,and cultural heritage. This ethnic nationalism harksback to the Slavophile view of Russians (or the Russian“soul”) as neither Western nor Asian, but as uniquelyspiritual, communally oriented, and intimately connectedto the Russian landscape. The second, or imperial ideal,views Russia as a great power and as the center (or theappropriate center) of a larger regional empire.

6

This im-perial identity is not necessarily defined by physical expan-sion, but by political, economic, or ideological influence,and it often incorporates a more pro-Soviet viewpoint.The third, or civic ideal, inclusively defines Russianidentity around democratic institutions, the rule of law(constitutionalism), and the populist-democratic uprisingagainst the Soviet Union.

7

This ideal has its roots in thewritings and deeds of Russia’s so-called Westernizers,

from Peter the Great forward, who believed that Russia’strue character is “modern” and European.

Nationalism remains a significant force in contempo-rary Russian politics, particularly as the country tries to(re)establish a distinct but powerful place in the globalpolitical order. In the early 1990s, Russians seemed todecisively reject the unity of Russian and Soviet identity(Dunlop 1993). Yet the relatively civic and democraticrhetoric of this early period did not provide a successfulnew model for Russian nationalism. As an analysis of po-litical struggles over Soviet-era places of memory shows,ethnic and imperial ideals remained prominent themesin Russian national narratives, while certain aspects ofSoviet identity re-emerged in the 1990s to bolster vari-ous versions of Russian national identity.

Building Symbolic Capitalin Post-Soviet Moscow

Monuments, memorials, museums, and place nameshave traditionally played a central role in defining Rus-sian national identity. Indeed, many of the first actionsof Russia’s new governments after the revolutions ofboth 1917 and 1991 involved renaming places and revis-ing monuments, suggesting that the control over sym-bolic public spaces is exceptionally important in Russianpolitics. In Russia, competition over Soviet-era monu-ments and memorials represented competition for theusable symbolic capital (honor, prestige, glory, sacrifice,and so on) embodied in these sites. As in Soviet times,political elites played the key role in the contentiousprocess of memorializing and renaming because they re-tained control over the resources required to build andalter public monuments.

8

In this context, one may extend the analogy betweensymbolic and economic capital further. As a number ofrecent works have documented, a relatively small num-ber of politically influential individuals acquired thebulk of state resources during the transformation fromthe command economy to the market system (Solnick1998; Cohen 2000; Johnson 2000; Reddaway and Glin-ski 2001). Russia became a capitalist economy, but onein which the disparities of the Soviet system were exag-gerated, and where a small group obtained the lion’s shareof wealth. Likewise, former Soviet political elites oftenretained enormous political power in Russia’s quasidem-ocratic system. Competition for symbolic capital thus in-volves principally these political elites, because botheconomic and symbolic resources are concentrated inthis small group. Even during the most turbulent peri-ods of 1991, political elites (albeit local ones) exerted

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 529

tremendous influence over even relatively spontaneousactions taken against monuments.

Russian politicians have used this power to attempt to“capture” monument sites (i.e., to assert the right to de-termine how sites will be used and changed) and to sparkdebates over monument sites as a means to engage inlarger ideological and political struggles. This process hasbeen particularly complicated because the relative conti-nuity of political elites during the post-Soviet transfor-mation has meant that while Russian elites may havebeen uncomfortable with many aspects of Soviet iden-tity, they often preferred to reinterpret rather than toerase or ridicule this past. Physical control over Soviet-era sites was not just a tangible manifestation of practicalpolitical power; it was, quite literally, an attempt to de-fine Russian national identity.

We focus on the political struggle over symbolic sitesin Moscow for two reasons. First, central Moscow isdensely packed with a wide variety of nationally signifi-cant Tsarist-era, Soviet, and post-Soviet places of mem-ory. Conflict over the design of individual monumentscan occur regardless of location, but conflict over place-ment is especially acute in symbolically dense landscapes,where even minor physical changes alter the meaning ofthe site as a whole, and where new monuments areplaced in specific relationship to existing memorials.

9

Itis hardly accidental, for example, that the designers ofVictory Park placed it beside the Triumphal Arch cele-brating the Russian victory over Napoleon. Red Squareand adjacent areas have even greater symbolic density,because this relatively small territory encompasses sitessuch as the Kremlin, the Place of Execution (Lobnoemesto), the Lenin Mausoleum, and the Tomb of the Un-known Soldier (Mogila Neizvestnogo soldata). Therefore,recent additions, such as an oversized equestrian statueof Marshall Zhukov (the general who led the Sovietarmy from Moscow to Berlin during the Great PatrioticWar) and the reconstructed Kazan cathedral (Kazanskiisobor), have meaning and repercussions for the othersites in the area as well.

Second, Moscow is both Russia’s largest city and theseat of the Russian government. As such, battles for con-trol over sites among city officials, the central government,the state Duma (Russia’s lower house of parliament), andvarious political parties have national resonance and rel-evance. Places of memory in national capitals reflect themost prominent elite conceptions of the nation, and aremost vulnerable to change during critical junctures.

While many groups and individuals had a strong in-terest in the fate of Moscow’s monuments, memorials,and museums, far fewer had the political power to affectthem physically in a systematic way. From 1991 through

1999, this drama had three primary actors: Moscow mayorYurii Luzhkov and the Moscow city government, theCommunist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), andthe administration of Russian president Boris Yeltsin.

Luzhkov actively wielded and amassed symbolic capi-tal in the city in order to define himself as a populist, na-tionalist, and anti-Soviet leader and to promote an imageof Russia as a great military and spiritual power bridgingthe gap between East and West. In his efforts to becomea more nationally known politician before the December1999 state Duma elections, Luzhkov also began to useethnic and imperial nationalist rhetoric to appeal to thebroader Russian public. For example, he presented him-self as a strong supporter of the rights of ethnic Rus-sians living in the “near abroad,” and suggested that theCrimea be returned to Russia from Ukraine. Throughouthis tenure, Luzhkov condemned the Soviet treatment ofMoscow as “barbarous destruction” and trumpeted hisextensive and high-profile restructuring of Moscow’shistorical landmarks as evidence of his commitment toa more traditional vision of the Russian nation (Luzh-kov 1996; Poliatykin 1996; Miliutenko 1999). AsLuzhkov himself (193) put it, “Our ‘revolution’ is no rev-olution, but only a slow return to the normal order ofthings.” Moreover, Luzhkov played an instrumental rolein encouraging the new Russian economic elite to helpfinance his construction efforts, offering them both lu-crative business relationships with the city and an oppor-tunity to polish their public images in exchange fortheir support.

In contrast, the KPRF (the leading party in the stateDuma) attempted to rehabilitate parts of the Soviet pastthrough preserving and redefining certain Soviet-eramonument sites. Although the KPRF admitted that theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had mademistakes, it emphasized that the Russian Revolution, theSoviet Union’s glorious victory in the Great PatrioticWar, and the USSR’s communist-led industrial modern-ization had transformed the backwards Russian imperialstate into one of the world’s two greatest powers. Ratherthan jettisoning that legacy, the KPRF and its supporterspreferred to preserve certain symbols of the Soviet pastas a way in which to promote their political vision of asocialist-nationalist Russian identity. They did not havethe power to erect new monuments in Luzhkov’s anti-Soviet Moscow, but they battled fiercely to preservemany of the old ones.

Finally, Russian president Boris Yeltsin presented him-self simultaneously as a Western-oriented democrat andas a Russian nationalist. Yeltsin’s nationalism aimed atengendering pride in the Russian state rather than inRussians as an ethnic group (for example, by using the

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term

rossiiskii

rather than

russkii

to talk about the nation).

10

As a result, he saw no inherent conflict between thesetwo conceptions of identity and attempted to use hiscontrol over symbolic capital to promote versions of both.At the same time, Yeltsin attempted to downplay and re-interpret Russia’s Soviet past. This proved particularlyimportant and tricky, because although Yeltsin wantedto be remembered as the man who had freed Russia fromSoviet power, during Soviet times he had swiftly risenthrough the ranks of the Communist Party and hadserved as a candidate member of the Soviet Politburo.Moreover, he admitted in 1990 that he “had until re-cently . . . thought of himself as a ‘Soviet’ and not a Rus-sian” (Dunlop 1993, 55). In a telling example of thiscomplexity, in Soviet times Sverdlovsk party boss Yeltsincarried out the physical destruction of the historic IpatievHouse, where the Bolsheviks murdered Tsar Nicholas IIand his family in 1918. Yet Russian president Yeltsin ac-tively led the effort to bring the royal family’s remainsback to St. Petersburg and give them a formal RussianOrthodox burial in 1998.

In many ways, Yeltsin’s own multiple, changing, andoften confused conceptions of identity mirrored a nation-wide disorientation. The process of creating a new Rus-sian national identity was so central, and so troublesome,that in July 1996 Yeltsin announced a year-long compe-tition to discover a new Russian “national idea,” with aten million ruble prize to be awarded to the victor. AsYeltsin observed, “In Russian history of the 20th centurythere were various periods—monarchism, totalitarianism,perestroika, and finally a democratic path of develop-ment. Each stage had its ideology . . . But now, we havenone” (quoted in Henry 1996, 1). Tellingly, this compe-tition had no winner. With Russian national identity upfor grabs, these politicians’ often conflicting efforts to(re)mold monument sites in Moscow reflected morethan their broader disagreements about Russian nationalidentity. Such endeavors represented a relatively cheapand potent way in which to signal their political inten-tions and to promote their preferred visions of Russia toa Russian population suffering from a severe post-Sovietidentity crisis.

Broadly speaking, Soviet-era monuments can be placedinto one of three logical categories, Co-opted/Glorified,Contested, or Disavowed, with their status determinedby the relative commemorative vigilance they have en-joyed since 1991. Consequently, the fate of monumentsreflects the different political status—and thus the differ-ing political uses (and usefulness)—of the symbolic cap-ital associated with sites of that type (Table 1). While weconcentrate primarily on Soviet-era sites, because theirpost-Soviet fates highlight the most controversial and

telling aspects of identity formation in Russia, the analy-sis can be extended to pre-Soviet sites as well.

Co-opted/Glorified Sites: The Past as Prologue

The first category, Co-opted/Glorified, contains thosesites which Russian political leaders have chosen to ex-pend considerable resources on redefining and reincor-porating into prominent public view since 1991. Thesesites, commemorating the Great Patriotic War, the Rus-sian Orthodox Church, and Tsarist-era Russian historyand culture, emphasize the “best” of Russia’s ethnic andimperial past while downplaying Russia’s troubled Soviet-era domestic heritage. Therefore, while the different po-litical factions typically agreed on the importance of thesesites, they vied with each other to gain physical controlover them and to become publicly associated with them.

The glorification of selected Tsarist-era sites reflectsthe desire of many nationalistic politicians to co-opt andredefine post-Soviet Russian national identity by appeal-ing to deeply held beliefs about Russia’s unique and im-portant spiritual and cultural heritage. For example, theRussian government paid for reconstructing the Tretia-kov Gallery, which showcases the best-known Russianpainters and iconographers. Similarly, political groups asdiverse as Luzhkov’s political party Otchestvo (Father-land), the KPRF, and eccentric nationalist VladimirZhirinovskii’s Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia engagedin elaborate public celebrations on the 200th birthday ofRussia’s beloved poet Aleksandr Pushkin. Each groupused the occasion to present itself as a superior defenderof Russian language and culture (Shulyakovskaya 1999).

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Rebuilding prominent Russian Orthodox churchesand monasteries represented an even more overtly polit-ical act, because it gave an explicit symbolic slap to So-viet power by physically replacing that which the Sovietgovernment had once wiped away. Moreover, it glorifiedthe Russian nation by reviving the Church’s traditionalemphasis on spiritual triumphalism, which depicted HolyRussia as the center of a religious empire. Yeltsin andother members of the Russian government flaunted their(in most cases newfound) religiosity by supporting re-construction efforts, while the KPRF generally ignored

Table 1.

Political Status of Soviet-Era “Places of Memory”

Co-opted/Glorified Contested Disavowed

World War II(Great Patriotic War)

Russian Revolution Lenin and other

Bolshevik leaders

CPSUSoviet economy

Russian OrthodoxyPre-1917 Russian

history/culture

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 531

these efforts. But it was Luzhkov, as an avowed anticom-munist and Russian nationalist, who took the lead inpolitically exploiting Moscow’s religious sites. Complet-ing plans made by the previous administration, the Mos-cow city government rebuilt the Kazan Cathedral onRed Square in 1993. This represented the first public res-toration of a completely destroyed church in Moscow(the revered church was dynamited in 1936, under Sta-lin). However, this was only a minor prelude to Luzh-kov’s extravagant reconstruction of the immense Cathe-dral of Christ the Savior (Khram Khrista Spasitelia).Although Stalin had destroyed the cathedral in order toerect a grandiose Palace of Soviets on its site, he nevermanaged to build the palace, and a decidedly mundaneswimming pool occupied the site for the rest of the So-viet era (Sidorov 2000). Luzhkov made its reconstruc-tion a centerpiece of his Moscow revitalization plans, of-ficially opening the cathedral during the city’s 1997celebration of Moscow’s 850th anniversary.

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As arguably the most tragic and glorious moment ofthe Soviet era, the Great Patriotic War and its associatedmemorial sites represent the most politically complexones in this category. Although what Tumarkin (1994)calls the “cult of World War II” declined precipitouslyduring the Gorbachev years as glasnost-inspired revela-tions undermined many Soviet myths surrounding thewar, Russian politicians used memorialization and pag-eantry to revive and reinterpret the war’s history in amuch more positive light after 1991. In Moscow, theTomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin walland Victory Park at Poklonnaia Gora are the most notableof these sites. The Russian government added an honorguard to the former site (in pointed contrast to the ear-lier removal of the honor guard at the Lenin Mauso-leum), while Luzhkov erected a prominent statue ofMarshall Zhukov around the corner in Manezh Square inpreparation for the May 1995 celebration of the fiftiethanniversary of the war’s end. All three primary politicalactors in Moscow rhetorically “glorified” the sites com-memorating the war and attempted to co-opt them forpolitical purposes. However, while Luzhkov and Yeltsinused the sites to redefine the war primarily as a great

Rus-sian

victory (won in spite of Stalin and the CPSU), theKPRF emphasized that the sites commemorate a

Soviet

victory. In doing so, the Communists attempted to usethe symbolic capital of these sites to rehabilitate the So-viet past and revive the memory of a larger, more power-ful Union.

This competition, redefinition, and glorification ofthe Great Patriotic War was most evident at VictoryPark (Figure 2). A huge complex, Victory Park spans 135hectares. On 23 February 1958, the Soviet government

first inaugurated the site with a modest obelisk statingthat “[A] memorial to the victory of the Soviet people inthe Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945, will be erected here”(

Krasnaia zvezda

1958).

13

In 1961, ground was broken forthe park, and the USSR Ministry of Culture later de-cided to build a museum on the site. However, construc-tion ceased completely under Gorbachev due to a lack offunds, a growing uneasiness about the Soviet myths sur-rounding WWII, and political demonstrations demand-ing that the museum be torn down and the hill itself(razed years earlier) be rebuilt. As Tumarkin observed inMay 1990, on the fortieth anniversary of the victory,“[T]he cult [of WWII] was manifestly finished as an insti-tution” (Tumarkin 1994, 190).

However, in 1993, Luzhkov took a personal interest inthe site and restarted the construction process to greatfanfare (Emil' Kinzhalov, head of scientific analysis forthe Exposition, Museum of the Great Patriotic War, in-terview, 6 August 1999, Moscow). Not only did the Mos-cow city government financially support the construc-tion efforts, but Luzhkov himself oversaw the project’srapid completion and participated (some might say med-dled) in the final design of the park, ending the contro-versy over (and public participation in) the design of the

Figure 2. The Victory Park Monument at Poklonnaia Gora.

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532 Forest and Johnson

central monument. As a coffee-table book produced forMoscow’s 850th anniversary celebration boasted:

In just a few years the city repaid its longstanding debt tothe veterans of the Great Patriotic War, which CPSU lead-ers Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev failed to do. Amemorial in honor of the victors was constructed on Pok-lonnaia Hill. A bronze obelisk-bayonet rises 141.8 metershigh, commemorating the 1,418 days of war. Mayor YuriiLuzhkov drew the sketch of the bayonet in the studio ofsculptor Zurab Tsereteli on March 27, 1994. (Zhigailov1996, 164)

Yeltsin, loathe to allow Luzhkov to gain all of thecredit, regularly appeared at the site as well. He presidedover opening ceremonies for the museum’s building onVictory Day (9 May) 1993, as well as at the official open-ing of the full complex on Victory Day 1995. Indeed, thecult’s re-emergence on the elite level became most evi-dent during the 1995 commemoration of the fiftieth an-niversary of the victory, when the Moscow city govern-ment, the Russian government, and the KPRF all heldmassive dueling celebrations, blanketing the city in mil-itary banners, posters, and other paraphernalia.

However, given the unsavory revelations of the Gor-bachev era, Luzhkov and Yeltsin could only tap the sym-bolic capital preserved in the Victory Park complex byredefining the Great Patriotic War as a victory for theRussian people, rather than for the Soviet Union. AsYeltsin remarked in a speech on Victory Day 1999, “[T]heholiday of victory unites all Russians, independent ofpersuasion or biases. Then and now, the strength of Rus-sia lies in national concord and unity” (quoted in

Mos-cow Times

1999). In emphasizing the Russian characterof Victory Day, the most controversial parts of the Sovietrole in WWII (such as Stalin’s pact with Hitler, the forc-ible incorporation of the Baltic states, the deportationsof non-Russian peoples, and the devastation of Ukraineand Belarus) could be swept aside. This left a neater, lessambiguous history with which to work.

At Victory Park, this redefinition was first accom-plished by adding prominent religious (i.e., anti-Soviet)elements to the site. Not only did St. George and two an-gels grace the central monument, but Luzhkov orderedthe construction of a Russian Orthodox church on thesite. The magnificent Cathedral of St. George, built in1994 and consecrated on 6 May 1995, occupies a centralposition on the complex’s main plaza. In addition, a fewyears later a mosque and synagogue were added to therear of the park. The mosque was completed in 1997,constructed through a joint initiative of the Moscow citygovernment and the Ecclesiastical Board of Moslems ofthe Central European Region of Russia. The Russian

Jewish Congress funded the synagogue, which opened inSeptember 1998. Both Yeltsin and Luzhkov spoke at thededication (Pestereva 1998).

Second, the reconstructors removed many of the orig-inally planned Soviet symbols from the park’s blueprints,replacing them with Russian symbols.

14

For example, anational contest held in the 1980s had determined thatthe central monument would be made of red granite, fea-turing an enormous curling banner topped with a star(

Russia Journal

1999). When Luzhkov restarted the con-struction, however, the commission went to his favoritesculptor, the controversial Zurab Tsereteli. Tsereteli’smonument downplayed the Soviet symbolism while in-corporating St. George and the dragon, the symbol of thecity of Moscow, at the center. In another case, the Mos-cow city government erected a statue group called “Tothe Defenders of the Russian Land” (

Zashchitnikam zemlirossiiskii

) on Kutuzovskii Prospect, anchoring the side ofthe park opposite the Triumphal Arch. This statue groupdepicts three Russian soldiers—ancient, Tsarist, andmodern—standing at attention, while bright yellowflowers spell out

Rus'

below (Figure 3). According to oneof the Park’s official brochures, “The sculpture group ‘Tothe Defenders of the Russian Land’ embodies the realiza-tion of our national community, the preservation anddefense of which is dearer than life” (Park Pobedy 1999).The brochure continues on in this vein, observing that“There are places in Russia where, upon visiting, a Rus-sian person (

russkii

) cannot remain unmoved. One ofthese is the Memorial of Victory on Poklonnaia gora . . .[which reminds one] of the striking manifestation of thesublime spirit of unity of the Russian people” (ParkPobedy 1999). What is truly striking is that this officialbrochure fails to mention the USSR at all. Through thisredefinition, Russian political elites obtained the sub-stantial symbolic capital tied into this Soviet-era site bystrategically ellipsing the past.

Contested Sites: The Past as Problem

The second category, Contested, contains Soviet-eramonuments that continued to be a source of major con-flict among the various political groups in Moscow espous-ing contrasting ideas of national identity. Monuments inthis category tended to be those commemorating Leninand the Russian Revolution, as opposed to the Sovietstate itself. In other words, they reflected the history andideals of the Revolution, rather than the oppressive in-stitutions of Soviet rule.

Not only did the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Squarerepresent the archetypal “contested” memorial, but Le-nin’s body was the single most sacred artifact for Russian

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 533

Communists (Figure 4). Communist state Duma speakerGennadii Seleznev spoke of the body in unabashedlyreverential terms: “There is a mass of people for whomthe name Lenin is a religion, just like God is a religion forOrthodox Christians” (

Agence France Presse

1999). Formany noncommunists, however, Lenin’s body was themummified personification of the Soviet past and a con-stant reminder of the Soviet Union’s quasireligious ven-eration of its doggedly secular leadership. As a result,after the failed coup in August 1991, politicians began anongoing, fierce debate over what to do with the imposingtomb and embalmed body of the leader of the OctoberRevolution.

After his death in 1924, Lenin’s body was preservedand placed in a temporary wooden crypt on Red Squarefor the funeral and public viewing. This building wassoon replaced by a larger, more elaborate wooden struc-ture, and then in 1930, under the direction of Stalin, bya stone mausoleum (Tumarkin 1997, 189–206). Until thelate 1980s, the site continued to attract thousands of vis-itors each day, visitors who often waited in line for hours,even in the depths of winter. Although the Soviets offi-cially characterized the preservation of the body as a sci-entific experiment, the act mirrored the old Russian tra-dition of preserving the bodies of tsars.

15

It also tappedthe Orthodox religious belief that saints’ bodies were in-corruptible after death (see Tumarkin 1997). After Sta-lin’s death, his body lay next to Lenin’s for eight years

until Khrushchev ordered it secretly removed overnightin 1961 as part of his de-Stalinization campaign.

After Yeltsin came to power, he made repeated threatsto bury Lenin’s remains. Shortly before we began our field-work, he renewed these threats, stating that the burials ofLenin and Tsar Nicolas II were two key goals for his finalterm in office (

Agence France Presse

1999). Like many ac-tual reburials, these threats carried potent political sym-bolism. By burying Lenin’s corporeal body, Russian lead-ers could bury “the invisible body ‘politic’ that wasimmortal, infallible, and capable of ‘absolute perfection’ ”(Bonnell 1997, 149). These repeated declarations alsoexacerbated the already high tensions among Russia’spolitical elite during this period and inspired renewedpopular interest. Long lines formed once again outsidethe mausoleum on Red Square during visiting hours, andelderly Communist demonstrators brandishing placardsreading “Hands Off Lenin!” kept angry watch over thebody. KPRF leader Gennadii Ziuganov warned that hisparty had a plan for “emergency measures” if Yeltsin at-tempted to remove the remains.

The burial controversy was only the most dramaticmanifestation of the long-running conflict over Lenin’sbody and the mausoleum itself. The cost of maintainingthe site, for example, was an ongoing source of bickeringamong Communists and noncommunists in the Dumaafter Yeltsin cut off funding for preserving Lenin’s bodyin 1993 (Yablokova 1998). Since then, the Lenin

Figure 3. “Defenders of the Russian Land” atVictory Park.

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Mausoleum Charitable Foundation has paid for the pres-ervation of the body itself, while the Russian govern-ment has paid for the upkeep of the structure (Hearst1999b). Like this financial division, the physical separa-tion of the body and the mausoleum may ultimately pro-vide a political compromise whereby Lenin would be re-buried, but the mausoleum itself would remain in place.

While the Lenin Mausoleum was the best-knowncontested site, there were many others. For example, theformer Museum of the Revolution (Muzei Revolutsii) onTverskaia Street lived on in altered form. While CPSU-controlled Soviet history museums in Moscow were uni-formly and quickly closed down, the Museum of the Rev-olution, administered by the Soviet Ministry of Culture,re-emerged as the Museum of the Contemporary Historyof Russia (Muzei Sovremennoi Istorii Rossii). Althoughit retained its unparalleled collection of revolutionarymemorabilia, in order to ensure the museum’s survival itscurators added high-quality exhibitions on political lifein the post-Soviet period and redefined it as a Russian—not Soviet—museum. However, the museum’s entries inthe

Moscow Encyclopedia

(a book financed by the city ofMoscow for the 850th anniversary celebration) revealedthe Luzhkov administration’s continuing discomfort overthe site (Shmidt 1998): the most prominent entry iden-tifies the building not as a museum, but as the EnglishClub, a reference to its Tsarist-era identity.

The fate of Lenin statues and of streets, parks, andbuildings in Moscow named after Lenin or the OctoberRevolution reflected a similar political discomfort anduncertainty. While many Lenin statues were pulleddown and places renamed, a significant number of othersremained unchanged. For example, prominent statues ofLenin still stood in October Square (Oktiabr'skaiaploshad') and at the former VDNKh, while the statue of

a thoughtful Lenin that had once graced the Kremlingardens quietly vanished. Likewise, the Lenin Hills (Len-inskyi gory) reverted to the Sparrow Hills (Vorob'evygory) and the Lenin Library became the Russian StateLibrary, but other names such as Lenin Prospect (Lenin-skii prospekt), the Leningrad Highway (Leningradskoeshosse), October Square, and the Square of the Revolu-tion (ploshad' revoliutsii) remained. Incongruously, theRevolution Square metro station still symbolically calledcitizens to arms with its numerous dramatic statues ofrevolutionary workers, soldiers, and peasants. The “con-tested” nature of such sites meant that each decision torename, remove, or redefine one was made and foughtover individually, with no single political group able tocompletely enforce its (re)interpretation of Lenin. More-over, the partial de-Leninization of Moscow physically re-flected Lenin’s ambiguous symbolic legacy for Russians.

Disavowed Sites: The Past as Pariah

The third category, Disavowed, encompasses thosemonuments that were removed, closed, or so changedthat their original symbolism was eradicated. This cate-gory includes monuments to the two defining institu-tions of the discredited Soviet state itself: the CPSU andthe command economy. No mainstream contemporarypolitical forces saw an advantage in incorporating theblatant Soviet symbolism of these sites into their Russiannation-building repertoires. As a result, the sites eitherwere simply ignored or became subject to massive redefi-nition and reconstruction.

Indeed, many sites in this category did not survive atall. For example, a Yeltsin decree of November 1993 per-manently closed the Central Lenin Museum, adminis-tered directly by the CPSU and commemorating the

Figure 4. The Lenin Mausoleum on RedSquare.

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 535

party’s history from the Revolution through the Gor-bachev era. Although named for Lenin, in Soviet timesthe museum “became a powerful center of propagandafor the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, and for the formationof intellectual and emotional fidelity to the communistparty’s policy and activity” (Van der Heijden 1998, 39).Unreformed communists occasionally demonstrated onits steps, but the KPRF refused to make the museum’s fatea political issue. Indeed, MMM—one of the most notori-ous Russian pyramid (Ponzi) schemes—kept offices onthe disgraced museum’s top floor.

The Exhibition of the Achievements of the NationalEconomy (VDNKh) represents the most interesting sitein this category (Figure 5). In Soviet times, VDNKh(originally founded in 1939 as the All-Union Agricul-tural Exhibition, or VSKhV) was the most importantpublic showplace for Soviet economic ideology. Whenthe exhibition first became permanent, its pavilions hon-ored the economic accomplishments of individual So-viet republics, with the golden “Fountain of the Friend-ship of Peoples” as its centerpiece. Under Khrushchev,the focus shifted from individual republics (which losttheir pavilions completely) to economic sectors such asmetallurgy, medicine, coal mining, and transportation.In its final form, this vast theme park dedicated to theglorification of the command economy included seventy-two exhibition pavilions, from the Atomic Energy Pavil-ion to the Pavilion of Large Horned Livestock. Locatedon 238 hectares on the far northeast side of Moscow, thepark attracted thousands of visitors to its economic exhi-bitions each year. According to one of its Soviet hagio-graphers, “VDNKh is the Soviet Union in miniature”(Il'in 1986, 3).

VDNKh’s turbulent and ironic post-Soviet history asa profitable commercial center and open-air flea marketepitomized Russia’s uneasy adaptation to capitalism. Asone of the women who had worked for years in the Met-allurgy Pavilion bluntly told us, “Everything changed im-mediately in 1991.” VDNKh no longer received govern-ment financing, and its dwindling cash resources andprestige led traveling exhibitions to go elsewhere. Indeed,in an interview in 1990, VDNKh’s primary architect al-ready spoke despairingly about the unkempt, almost aban-doned grounds (Glushchenko 1990). Yeltsin himselfchanged VDNKh’s name to the generic All-RussianExhibition Center (VVTs) in June 1992 by decree. In1999, director Vasilii Shupyro could still complain that“Architectural monuments remain here with us, no moreand no less than 46. But for their upkeep we don’t re-ceive a single kopeck from the state” (quoted in Korot-kaia 1999, 1). Most notably, the famous statue “TheWorker and the Collective Farm Girl” (Rabochii i kolk-hoznitsa) outside and to the right of the main entrancestood neglected, its surroundings weedy and its reflectingpool empty.

However, although the site’s symbolic capital had rap-idly depreciated, its fixed capital remained. The pavilionworkers, left on their own, began to rent space in theirnow-bare pavilions to small traders and merchants. Withits vast array of pavilions and its own metro stop (stillcalled VDNKh), VVTs soon became a bizarre sort ofmall. A children’s play center with a Jungle Book themeappeared in the Chemistry Pavilion, while the AtomicEnergy Pavilion boasted an “information technologycenter” with computers, faxes, printers, and copying ser-vices. At VVTs, Russians could buy everything fromhome electronics to jewelry to cars. Later, the complexallowed an amusement park to move in. The Soviet-eranames on the pavilions began to come down, replaced bynumbers. In the absence of state funding, the leadershipof VVTs devised a strategic plan in 1999 to attempt tolure more large-scale commercial exhibitions to the site.This strategic plan listed Ekspotsentr and Rosstroiekspoexhibition centers as the main competition for VVTs,and discussed the need to improve the VVTs “image”(Sovet directorov 1999). VVTs even threw itself a largesixtieth-anniversary celebration in the summer of 1999,with special exhibitions on its history and on Russian in-dustry and agriculture. According to Shupyro, VVTs de-cided to hold this celebration because “[W]e want fa-mous people to come here and to talk with us about ourproblems” (Borodina 1999, 1). Although anachronismslike a large Lenin statue and a rocket in front of theformer Cosmos Pavilion remained, the original meaningof the site had been stripped. As a Western reporter

Figure 5. The main entrance to All-Russian Exhibition Center(VVTs) (the former VDNKh) during its sixtieth-anniversary cele-bration in August 1999.

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noted in 1994, “The panoply of imported goods promptedone foreign visitor to dub VDNKh ‘the Exhibition of theAchievements of the Peoples of Germany, Japan, andKorea’ ” (Barnard 1994, 3). While VDNKh had cele-brated Soviet citizens as producers, VVTs embraced Rus-sian citizens as consumers.

The Park of Arts: The Past as Past

Our fourth study site, the Park of Arts, illustrates howsites could shift between categories as the political windsshifted towards more or less pro-Soviet views of Russianhistory. Pictures of Russians physically tearing down stat-ues of Soviet leaders in 1991 provided some of the mostenduring images of the USSR’s collapse. The subsequenttreatment of such statues shows how the meaning ofmonuments and memorials can change by changing theirphysical context, or

spatial framing.

These Soviet iconsmoved from public spaces representing national identity,to a literal trash heap, to a tourist attraction, and finallyto a historical and artistic display.

Images and accounts of crowds toppling the statue ofsecret police founder Feliks Dzerzhinskii from the frontof KGB headquarters in Lubianka Square on 22 August1991 suggest that it was a spontaneous act against themost feared and hated icon of Soviet repression. How-ever, the description of the incident in Luzhkov’s auto-biography (1996, 272–76) argues that he—or, at least,municipal authorities—played a significant role in thisevent. According to Luzhkov’s account, the crowd wasunable to knock over the massive bronze figure, so theprefect of the central Moscow region, Aleksandr Muzy-kantskii, shouted over a megaphone that “[T]he decisionto remove the monument has already been made! Thestatue of Dzerzhinskii absolutely will be removed! Now!Quickly! Three powerful cranes are already on the way!

It is simply necessary to wait.” After the cranes arrivedand took down the statue, they were used to pull downnearby statues of Soviet leaders Kalinin and Sverdlov.

16

While Luzhkov had an incentive to exaggerate hisown part in this process, Moscow city officials certainlyplayed a key role in the removal and relocation of localmonuments. After their removal, several Soviet-eramonuments were placed haphazardly in a field behindthe Central House of Artists (Figure 6). Luzhkov describesthe creation of this park as “an excellent thought. Itcalled into being a longtime dream: to gather together allof the bronze and granite Soviet leaders, heroes, farmers,to enclose them in a fence, and allow children to playthere.” Many of the statues were physically damaged orsprayed with paint either during or after the moving pro-cess. The treatment of these statues was perhaps the mostspontaneous deconstruction of the Soviet state by theRussian public, and it represented a literal attempt to“trash” Soviet history. Other than actual physical de-struction, this was perhaps the most radical form of dis-avowal that a monument could suffer.

Yet these monuments did not disappear from publicconsciousness. After abandonment in the park, the jum-ble of Soviet icons acquired such kitsch-value that thearea became a popular tourist destination. In 1996, theMoscow city government formalized the display by re-storing the statues, installing small plaques identifyingthe figures, and naming the area the Park of Arts (some-times also referred to as “The Park of Totalitarian Art”).The new park was placed under the jurisdiction of Muzeon,a subsidiary of the government of Moscow’s Committeeon Culture, and became a display area for contemporaryartistic works. By the summer of 1999, former Sovietleaders shared the park with a rose garden, abstract reli-gious art, and numerous busts. These busts depicted Rus-sian cultural icons such as Pushkin, Gogol, Gorky, Yasenin,

Figure 6. The “Graveyard of Statues”(Park of Arts) in 1992.

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 537

and Lomonosov, Russian political and military leaders likePeter the Great and Kutuzov, and, more startlingly, foreignwriters, artists, and scientists, including Einstein, Shakes-peare, van Cliburn—and Gandhi! Part of the groundswas also converted to an outdoor workshop for sculptors.

The most important Soviet-era statues in the Park ofArts had plaques identifying the subject, artist, materialused, and location where the piece had been displayed.After this description, the plaques ended with a depolit-icizing disclaimer: “It has historical and artistic value.The monument is in the memorializing style of political-ideological designs of the Soviet period. Protected by thestate.” Guides who conducted tours of the park werecareful to describe the Soviet statues in similar terms.Characterizing these statues solely in historical and artis-tic terms was intended to drain them of their politicalsignificance by politically decontextualizing them andemphasizing their alleged artistic value. Indeed, exceptfor the statue of Stalin, the pieces were placed haphaz-ardly, and the descriptions never referred to more than asingle statue.

17

Although such displays are more respect-ful than a trash-heap, most statues in the park were effec-tively stripped of their political significance. Indeed, oursurvey revealed that almost all visitors used the Park ofArts simply as the nearest, most convenient park. Suchdepoliticization illustrates the Moscow government’ssuccess in removing the symbolic significance once em-bodied in these works.

The statue of Dzerzhinskii (Figure 7) became a partialexception to the decontextualization strategy when itshifted from the disavowed to contested category in 1998.On December 2, the state Duma approved a resolutionasking that the Moscow city government restore thestatue to its former place on Lubianka Square (Tolstikhina1998). Although the resolution, sponsored by the Agrar-ian and Communist parties, advocated the return “as asymbol of the fight against crime” (Tolstikhina, 4), thebroader symbolic meaning was clear: the Soviet pastshould be restored to its rightful place. Both the Moscowcity Duma and Luzhkov ignored the resolution, charac-terizing it as a violation of local control without address-ing the symbolic significance of Dzerzhinskii: “Whatmonument will stand on Lubianka may be decided onlyby Muscovites” (Yablokova 1998). The statue remainedin the Park of Arts, but as a contested monument. In July2000 the KPRF and its allies tried again (albeit unsuc-cessfully this time) to pass a similar resolution in the stateDuma (Reuters 2000; Uzelac 2000). With the ascent offormer KGB agent and Federal Security Service headVladimir Putin to the Russian presidency in March 2000,the fate of Dzerzhinskii’s statue will remain contested forquite some time.

Public Opinion and Elite Control of Monuments

The quasidemocratic nature of Russia’s political sys-tem means that the public has not directly and consis-tently participated in the official monument-buildingand memorialization process. In other words, it is in theinterest of elites to appeal to popular opinion, but not tocede actual control over monuments and memorials.Even the most populist, apparently spontaneous actionshave been strongly influenced, if not coordinated, byelite political interests. Luzhkov, as we have seen, tookcredit for removing the statue of Dzerzhinskii by chan-neling this “excellent thought” into concrete action. In-deed, he (1996, 276) is explicit about the importance ofelite control, stating that “Maybe Muscovites will re-move some monuments in the future. It is possible. Butthis must happen by a decision of city authorities, andnot by the will of the crowd. In general, the crowd doesnot have the right to dictate its decision.”

These autocratic tendencies do not mean, however,that Luzhkov and other political leaders often acted

Figure 7. The statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii in the Park of Arts in1999.

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538 Forest and Johnson

against popular opinion when they took this leadingrole. Although the manipulation of and conflict overmonuments and memorials has taken place principallyamong the political elites of Russia, it has also been astruggle for popular legitimacy. Indeed, the symboliccapital of monuments and memorials depends, to one de-gree or another, on the recognition of the prestige and le-gitimacy of these sites by the general public.

This issue raises broader questions concerning the re-ception of these monuments by their intended audi-ence—the Russian public. The conventional model oftextual interpretation (drawn from both literary criti-cism and landscape studies in geography) has emphasizedeither the issue of authorship (the intention behind thecreation of a text or interpretation) or the interpretationof texts/landscapes in and of themselves. More recentpoststructuralist approaches, however, have focused newattention on the question of reception or readership(Natter and Jones 1993). From this perspective, themeaning of a text, landscape, or (in our case) monu-ment is always polymorphous and dependent on multi-ply situated readers. The ability of the state or politicalelites to impose their intended meaning on an audienceis limited by the active role readers play in the creationof meaning.

In an effort to assess the reception of places of memoryin Moscow, we administered a twenty-six-question (two-page) survey instrument to 501 Russians visiting the fourmonument sites under study.

18

Our surveys revealed con-siderable uniformity in public views of various promi-nent monument sites in Moscow, and indicated thatalthough Russian elites may not be directly account-able to the public in these matters, at some level theiractions must resonate with the popular imagination inorder for these elites to acquire symbolic capital.

We asked our respondents to rank seven prominentMoscow sites and seven national holidays in order ofimportance (see Tables 2 and 3). As expected, placesand dates that honor Russian history and culture (theKremlin, the Tretiakov Gallery, Pushkin Square, NewYear’s Day, and Orthodox Christmas) and commemo-rate the Great Patriotic War (Victory Park and VictoryDay) ranked highest.

19

In other words, Luzhkov andYeltsin successfully co-opted and glorified sites that al-ready embodied many popular Russian symbols andsentiments. In another example, although Russian ob-servers occasionally criticized specific aspects of theVictory Park complex during its construction, after itsopening it quickly became a popular site for war veter-ans, school groups, military ceremonies, and bridal par-ties (not to mention skateboarders and picnickers). In-deed, on a single Friday afternoon in June 2001, we

observed over twenty separate bridal parties at the parkduring a one-hour period. Victory Park came to rival theTomb of the Unknown Soldier as a required post-weddingdestination.

Similarly, Luzhkov’s unilateral decision to reconstructthe Tsarist-era Church of Christ the Savior on the site ofa popular swimming pool drew surprisingly few protests,even though the city is severely underserved by such rec-reational facilities (Sidorov 2000, 561). Our survey re-vealed hearty support for the reconstruction after thefact—just over 67 percent of those surveyed either“strongly agreed” or “agreed” with the rebuilding.

20

Ac-tions such as the removal of Dzerzhinskii’s statue and thereconstruction of the Church of Christ the Savior thusdid more than merely express popular will or serve eliteinterests at the expense of the public. Rather, Luzhkovtook action (and credit) after correctly “reading” popularsentiment, and in doing so, captured the symbolic capital

Table 2.

Survey Ranking of Moscow Sites

Sites Ranking

Kremlin 1.72Tretiakov Gallery 2.99Victory Park 3.62Pushkin Square 4.24Moscow State University 4.45Lenin Mausoleum 4.85

The “White House”

6.02

Note:

Sites ranked in order of most important (1) to least important (7).

n

�

390 to 460. Rank order did not change when we limited the sample toMoscow residents (

n

�

232), and the only notable difference was the rela-tively lower score Moscow residents gave to the Lenin Mausoleum (5.23).Similarly, rank order varied by survey site in only one instance: visitors tothe Lenin Mausoleum ranked it fourth (3.76), while respondents at allother sites ranked it sixth (still well ahead of the White House).

Table 3.

Survey Ranking of Major State Holidays

Holidays Ranking

New Year’s Day (January 1) 1.35Victory Day (May 9) 2.90Orthodox Christmas (January 7) 2.95May Day (May 1) 4.64Russian Independence Day (June 12) 6.01Revolution Day (November 7) 6.16

Constitution Day (December 12)

6.45

Note:

Holidays ranked in order of most important (1) to least important(7).

n

�

373 to 481. Many respondents to this question did not rank allseven holidays, typically responding instead in what we came to call the “1-2-3 go-to-hell” pattern. These respondents ranked New Year’s Day, VictoryDay, and Christmas Day (and sometimes May Day), while giving 7s to therest of the holidays or leaving them blank. Using only “correct” responses(i.e., those 142 respondents who consecutively ranked all holidays) doesnot change the rank ordering of these “rejected” holidays, but it does raisetheir respective scores slightly (May Day

�

3.96, Independence Day

�

5.34, Revolution Day

�

5.85, and Constitution Day

�

6.11).

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 539

associated with the sites. Luzhkov’s occasional failure inthis regard, such as the intense public displeasure evokedby his decision to erect Tsereteli’s immense, unattractivestatue of Peter the Great on the banks of the Moscowriver, underscores the importance of readership in theaccumulation of symbolic capital.

The conflict over Lenin’s body and tomb during thesummer of 1999 illustrates a more complex case of the in-tertwined relationship between political elites and popu-lar opinion. In this instance, Yeltsin and the KPRF (andassociated parties) were the principal players vying forcontrol over Lenin’s body. Although active protests de-fending Lenin’s place in the mausoleum occurred at thesite, public opinion—even among those visiting the body—strongly favored burial (see Table 4).

21

A nationwidepoll conducted by the Foundation for Public Opinion inearly August 1999 yielded similar results, with 53 per-cent of respondents in Moscow and St. Petersburg ac-tively advocating burial. This same national poll also re-vealed that only those individuals over 50 years old, withless than a secondary-school education, or living in ruralareas of Russia rejected burying Lenin more often thanthey favored it. The Lenin Mausoleum remained con-tested despite the broad local support for burial primarilybecause the KPRF made it a center of symbolic resis-tance to both Yeltsin and Luzhkov. Although the con-stituencies objecting to burial were relatively far re-moved from the levers of power, the strong core ofprotesters at the site also helped to prevent any action.Yet the reasons for the standoff were perhaps more com-plex. The protesters provided Yeltsin and Luzhkov witha visible “threat” from the KPRF, aiding their own ef-forts to garner political support from anticommunists.The failure to bury the body despite Yeltsin’s repeatedthreats and Luzhkov’s enormous power in Moscow sug-gests that carefully managing the popular support forburial was politically more useful than actually doing it.In a sense, Yeltsin and Luzhkov used the negative sym-bolic capital associated with the site to cultivate theirown legitimacy.

Comparative Memorialization in the Post-Soviet Era

We have sought to demonstrate how changes to Soviet-era monuments and memorials both reflected and pro-duced emerging forms of post-Soviet Russian identity.During this critical juncture in Russia’s history, elitesglorified monuments celebrating elements of Sovietidentity associated with the Great Patriotic War, re-weaving these events with more explicit appeals to eth-nic Russian heritage and the Orthodox Church in orderto recast the war as a victory for the Russian people.Monuments commemorating Lenin and the Russian Rev-olution had a more ambiguous status, with elites eitherunwilling or unable to effectively co-opt or desecratethese sites. Finally, sites celebrating the CPSU and thecommand economy found little support among politicalelites, with even the KPRF investing its energy in pro-tecting the status of the Lenin Mausoleum.

If nationalism involves the weaving together of his-torical events, characters, myths, and pure fiction into aconstitutive narrative of political identity, the re-creationof Russian identity during this critical juncture between1991 and 1999 involved the selective unraveling of thefabric of the Soviet “nation.” Yet a number of competing“weavers”—political factions—undertook this re-creationin the style of the Tsarist and Soviet states, co-optingand building grandiose monuments that emphasizedovert iconographic symbols, highlighted ethnic and im-perial conceptions of Russian identity, and reinterpretedrather than rejected much of Soviet history.

22

This fail-ure to decisively break with the Soviet past during Rus-sia’s window of opportunity legitimized President Putin’ssubsequent efforts to revive, rewrite, and manipulate So-viet history for his own political ends.

After Putin’s election in March 2000 and the elec-toral success of his affiliated Unity party in the Decem-ber 1999 Duma elections, both the KPRF and Luzhkovsaw their power to influence national politics fade andsought accommodation with the Putin regime.

23

As a re-sult, Putin enjoyed a freer hand in manipulating the sym-bolic landscape of Moscow. His first such act installed aplaque and bust dedicated to former KGB head andSoviet general secretary Yurii Andropov at the Lubianka.Later, Putin declared that Lenin, at least for the mo-ment, would stay put on Red Square. As Putin observed,“Once I see an overwhelming majority of people wantingto tackle the Lenin question, we will discuss it. But todayI don’t see it and therefore we will not talk about it”(Reuters 2001).

More disturbing, though, was the symbolic renais-sance that Stalin enjoyed once Putin came to power. For

Table 4.

“Lenin’s body should be buried.” (July/August 1999)

StronglyAgree(%)

Agree(%)

Neutral(%)

Disagree(%)

StronglyDisagree

(%)

Lenin’sMausoleum(

n

�

132) 12.1 40.2 18.2 22.7 6.8All sites

(

n

�

390)

21.5

39.2

15.1

19.0

5.1

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540 Forest and Johnson

celebrations surrounding Victory Day 2000, Putin notonly began his presidential address to veterans with theprecise words Stalin had spoken in 1945, but installed acommemorative plaque at the Kremlin honoring Stalin(among others) as a war hero and authorized the CentralBank of Russia to print commemorative coins with Sta-lin’s portrait (Traynor 2000). Not long afterwards, he ap-proved the restoration of the Soviet national anthem asthe Russian anthem, with new words venerating theRussian homeland penned by the aging author of the old.Putin even approved the installation of a bust of Stalin atVictory Park, albeit inside the museum rather than inthe park itself. With this symbolic rehabilitation of Sta-lin, Putin found common ground with the KPRF in amutual veneration of Soviet-style political order andmilitary glory reinterpreted as Russian ethnic and impe-rial tradition.

In many ways, the historical and geographic congru-ence of Russia and the USSR means that some continu-ity was to be expected, but it is also fair to ask what alter-natives existed. Examples from the Czech Republic andHungary suggest how radically the style of monumentsand the memorialization process can change during post-communist critical junctures.

In contrast to the generally mammoth scale and intenseethnic-imperial symbolism of official post-Soviet Russianmemorials, many state monuments erected in East Euro-pean countries since 1989 drew their power from modestyand simplicity and emphasized civic-democratic values.For example, a small memorial in the Czech Republiccommemorates the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989. Themonument hangs inconspicuously under an arcade inPrague at the site of the protest march that sparked theVelvet Revolution. It consists of a small plaque with the date(“17.11.1989”) and eight hands reaching upwards, givingthe split-fingered victory sign or simply showing openpalms. Similarly, the Hungarian monument to Imre Nagy(the Communist leader whom the Soviets executed forhis sympathetic role in the 1956 revolution) depicts anordinary, life-sized man standing on a bronze bridge. Thememorial’s spatial placement, however, packs a punch.With clear sight lines, Nagy pointedly turns his back onthe controversial Red Army Memorial honoring the So-viet “liberation” of Budapest in 1945, and looks towardthe massive Hungarian parliament building, a failed re-former standing on a bridge between two worlds.

Similarly, Czech and Hungarian treatment of Soviet-era monuments reflects an irony missing in the Russiancontext. For example, the Czech government approvedthe installation of a giant metronome on the base of whathad been the world’s largest statue of Stalin in Prague.Boym (2001, 231) describes it as an “anti-memorial,” and

observes that “The rhythm of the metronome deprivestime of direction . . . [as] opposed to the teleological,forward-looking time of Marxist-Leninist progress towardthe bright future.” In another case, a group of Czech artistsdealt with a particularly disliked memorial—a Soviettank—by repeatedly painting it bright pink until theSoviets were forced to remove it out of embarrassment.In Hungary, the state moved the most prominent Soviet-era statues in Budapest to a small, specially designed parkon the outskirts of the city. Unlike Moscow’s Park ofArts, Statue Park in Budapest does not pretend that itsstatuary is anything but political. Rather, the park simul-taneously emphasizes the statues’ political character androbs them of their emotive power by clearly situating them(and their associated messages) in an anachronistic past.

The treatment of Soviet-era monuments does presentdifferent issues in Russian and non-Russian contexts,since the removal of Soviet monuments from publicspaces in East Europe can be interpreted as a process ofdecolonization. Consequently, former Eastern-bloc coun-tries have been able to draw on images of national iden-tity that are unavailable to Russia. As Urban (1994) sug-gests, Russia lacks an alien outsider against which tobuild its national identity. Countries such as the CzechRepublic, Hungary, and Poland have constructed na-tional narratives in which their “genuine” national iden-tities have reemerged after suppression during the Sovietperiod (see Dawson 1999). Indeed such “anti-imperialist”narratives have deep historical roots in the East Euro-pean nations (Elster, Offe and Preuss 1998, 252–53). Thesymbolic response of these countries has been mirroredby their effort to seek closer ties to Western Europe (byjoining NATO, the European Union, and so on), and bythe establishment of relatively strong democratic politi-cal institutions.

Such strategies are more problematic for Russia, forobvious reasons. However, the German experience alsosuggests how the memorialization process can achieverelatively drastic breaks with the past. In addition tobearing the historical legacy of the Holocaust and Nazism,Germany has undergone a process of de-Nazification, de-colonization (from both the East and West), and unifica-tion. In particular, the legacies of Nazi-era ethnic-imperialnationalism presented deeply troubling questions aboutthe specific character of the German nation, the signifi-cance of history in national identity, and the role of na-tionalism in state building. Although the creation ofGerman monuments after 1945 was not unproblematic,the process involved more public participation, gener-ated extensive self-critical examination, and was highlysensitive to potential physical and symbolic continuitieswith the Nazi period (Till 1999). Kramer (2001, 1, 3)

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 541

suggests that Germany’s efforts to come to terms with itstroubled past “were vital in consolidating the democraticfoundations of the new Germany,” and that, in compari-son, “so long as the symbols and institutions of Soviet re-pression are still flourishing in Russia, the prospects fordemocracy will be dim.”

Nonetheless, a select few memorials in Moscow didnot replicate the monumental scale and messages of theTsarist and Soviet traditions. For example, the monu-ment commemorating victims of Stalinist repression,erected in a park adjacent to the former site of Dzerzhin-skii’s statue and to the Lubianka in October 1990, issubtle, understated, and abstract (Figure 8). It consists ofa single boulder from the Solovki gulag placed on a lowmarble platform. The stone is in an apparently precari-ous position, seemingly ready to tumble over on its side.A paragraph of text explaining the monument is etchedin the horizontal surface, so that one must lean over theplatform to read it.

24

The entire memorial is less than twometers high. Its origin also differs from the ones we havediscussed earlier because it was constructed through theefforts of Memorial, a society founded in the late 1980sdedicated to the rehabilitation and commemoration ofthose killed under Stalin. As such, Memorial was oneof the first major independent grassroots organizationsin the Soviet Union (White 1995; K. Smith 1996). Inshort, the Solovki monument differs in construction, de-sign, and origin; its form and provocative location arethe antithesis of official, grandiose Soviet-era and con-temporary Russian monuments. Organizations like Me-morial and monuments like the Solovki stone may notrepresent the future of Russian civil society (or a perma-

nent break with the tradition of bombastic national mon-uments). However, they do suggest that Russia’s “culturaltool kit,” while dominated by ethnic and imperial concep-tions of the nation, may have contained enough equipmentto build a viable civic tradition as well (Swidler 1986).

Symbolic Capital and “Missing” Monuments

If such alternatives existed in the early 1990s, why didRussian political elites reject civic nationalism during thetransformation period and draw predominantly uponethnic and imperial traditions instead? In the optimisticatmosphere of 1991, the emergence of civic-democraticrepresentations of the Russian nation seemed not onlypossible, but likely. The subsequent failure to constructmonuments to democratic ideals or figures, or to thedemocratic Russian state itself, has been so striking thatthey constitute a “missing” category of civic monuments.By way of conclusion, we demonstrate that analyzing ab-sent or “missing” monumental forms in terms of theirsymbolic capital is also important in understandingpolitical struggles over national identity. This absenceresulted neither from elite suppression of popular demo-cratic will nor from an inherently authoritarian politicalculture. Rather, like the redefinition of Soviet sites, it canbe traced to the interaction between Soviet-era symboliclegacies and the contingent relationship of political eliteswith the public during the post-Soviet transformation.

Just a few years into the transition, powerful politicalelites and the Russian public both exhibited lukewarmsupport, at best, for civic representations of the nation.For their part, not only did political elites express littleinterest in building new civic monuments, they ignoredthose few that already existed. For example, neither Yeltsinnor Luzhkov preserved the trolleybus used as a barricadein front of the Russian White House during the attemptedcoup in 1991. The vehicle—rammed by a tank during thestandoff—was initially placed in front of the Museum ofContemporary History and served as a reminder of thedeaths of three civilians killed during the defense (York1998). It was a potentially powerful monument to theideals of civic nationalism, embodying martyrdom in de-fense of democracy and the rule of law. By the spring of1998, however, museum visitors and curators consideredthe wrecked orange trolleybus an eyesore, and it was re-moved from public view. Unlike many Soviet-era memo-rials, the functional disavowal of this potentially power-ful civic symbol appeared to arise from neglect rather thandesign. Yet any of the glorified monuments in Moscowwould have suffered the same fate without “commemora-tive vigilance” by political patrons. The neglect of theFigure 8. The Solovki memorial in front of the Lubianka.

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trolleybus illustrated the broader failure of civic identityto capture the elite or popular imagination.

Similarly, our surveys revealed the limited appeal ofcivic-democratic symbols for the Russian public. For ex-ample, our respondents ranked the site that had originallybeen most closely associated with a civic national iden-tity, the White House, a distant last of the seven possiblechoices. The White House was the seat of the electedRussian Supreme Soviet during the August 1991 coupattempt, where Yeltsin famously stood on top of a tank todefend the Union’s Constitution and the Russian gov-ernment. Perhaps more than any other location, it repre-sents the place where the Soviet hold on power finallydissolved. Nonetheless, most of our respondents held itin contempt, and fewer than twenty (3.8 percent) rankedit as the first or second most important site in Moscow.Our respondents also ranked civic holidays (Constitu-tion Day and Russian Independence Day) at the bottomof the list. Like the White House, the two civic holidaysmarked events that might objectively be considered foun-dational to post-Soviet Russia. Russian IndependenceDay (12 June) commemorates both the declaration ofstate sovereignty in 1990 and Yeltsin’s election as presi-dent of Russia in 1991.

25

Continuing public contemptled Yeltsin to rename it “Russia Day” in 1997 (commem-orating all of Russia’s history), thereby further limitingany unique significance the date might otherwise haveheld (K. Smith 1999). Another new holiday, Constitu-tion Day (12 December), ranked last; not a single respon-dent ranked it first and only seven ranked it as the secondmost important holiday. Constitution Day held little ifany popular significance and illustrated the weakness as-sociated with a civic-democratic national identity.

As we have suggested, this outcome was not inevita-ble. Russia’s most influential political elites and thebroader public joined in rejecting symbolic expressionsof civic-democratic nationalism for three principal rea-sons. First, creating new symbolic capital is more difficultthan glorifying or disavowing existing monuments. Dur-ing critical junctures at which political elites compete forpublic legitimacy, they act like

bricoleurs

, taking a pas-tiche of materials at hand to create a coherent narrativeof tradition, memory, and history. As with all nationalistmovements, historical figures and events—and theirconcrete expression in monuments and memorials—servedas a basic resource for Russian political actors. Since thecivic conception rejects the imperialism of Russia’s pastas well as ethnic definitions of the nation, political eliteswanting to promote a civic identity could only drawupon the limited repertoire of the post-Soviet period.Indeed, the imperial and ethnic traditions of Russiannationalism offer powerful alternatives that are at best

indifferent to democracy and constitutionalism. This needto draw on existing sources of symbolic capital helps ex-plain how Russia moved from an apparently decisive re-jection of Soviet identity in 1991 to increasingly author-itarian, Soviet-style forms of identity by 1999. Russianelites could convert the charisma associated with certainSoviet-era monuments into ethnic and imperial nationalvisions more easily than they could create new symboliccapital based on civic-democratic nationalism.

Second, limited participation in the memorializationprocess also limited the scope of possible results. Al-though Russia’s critical juncture led to the introductionof democratic political institutions, many Soviet-erapolitical elites retained influence in this new system andpolitical and economic power quickly became concen-trated in a relatively small group of people. This bothconstrained the debate over Russian national identityand restricted the control over public space necessary toexpress different conceptions of identity in monumentalform. Russia’s most powerful politicians would not per-mit the leaders of either the most politically liberal or themost politically nationalist parties (most of whom didnot have a Soviet political background) to even enterinto the competition to define and control Russian placesof memory. For example, although Grigorii Yavlinskii’spolitical party Yabloko espoused a clear civic-democraticvision for Russia and passed the electoral threshold forDuma representation in the 1993, 1995, and 1999 elec-tions, Yeltsin and Luzhkov’s physical control over Mos-cow made it difficult for Yabloko to impress its idealsupon the landscape. The public had even less opportu-nity to participate actively in this endeavor. While politi-cal transformations in many postcommunist societies loos-ened state control over places of memory, in Russia therestricted elite competition for control over monumentsand memorials discouraged direct popular participation.

Yet if the public—the “readers” of official monuments—had expressed more enthusiasm for a civic-democraticnationalism, political elites would probably have re-sponded by at least incorporating civic themes into ex-isting monument sites. As we have seen, political elitesare acutely aware of the public’s reception and interpre-tation of their memorializing efforts. The tepid public re-sponse to the Yeltsin administration’s tentative efforts toestablish civic holidays, for example, sent political elitesthe message that investing in civic nationalist celebra-tions and sites offered them little in the way of symboliccapital. This did not reflect an inherently antidemo-cratic streak in Russians. Although shocked by the col-lapse of the USSR (and the dramatic shrinking of theirstate), early in the transformation period Russians oftenexpressed strong support for many basic democratic

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 543

ideals (Hahn 1991; Tedin 1991; Gibson, Duch, andTedin 1992). As a number of observers suggest, the pub-lic rejection of civic nationalism stemmed from the eco-nomic dislocation and poorly performing democraticpolitical institutions in Russia after 1991 (Tolz 1998b;Boym 2001; Carnaghan 2001). In a typical statement,the director of the Museum of Contemporary History ob-served that “[M}aybe if people’s lives had improved after1991, [the orange trolleybus-barricade] would have re-mained a symbol . . . But if you’re not getting your wagespaid, you lose interest in your ideals” (quoted in York1998, 5). Likewise, the Yeltsin government’s military at-tack on the White House in October 1993 (against Su-preme Soviet representatives who had barricaded them-selves inside in defiance of Yeltsin’s decision to disbandthat body) tainted the public’s image of both the govern-ment and the site. Overall, the perceived failures ofWestern-inspired political democracy and economic lib-eralism left the Russian public with little patience forsymbolic appeals to civic-democratic ideals, and manyinstead turned back to the Russian and Soviet pasts intheir search for identity.

The ethnic-imperial expressions of Russian national-ism that came to dominate Moscow’s symbolic landscapeshould thus be seen primarily as the result of contingentfactors—competition among a small group of politicalelites for existing symbolic capital and public disappoint-ment with the initial transformation process—ratherthan as the emergence of an “essential” Russian nationalidentity. In particular, the concentration of control oversymbolic capital affected both the process and the resultsof memorialization in post-Soviet Russia. Civil societyexercised little influence over the memorialization pro-cess, and the nation has not been represented as a dem-ocratic entity. While a window of opportunity openedslightly for civic-democratic nationalism at the begin-ning of the transformation period, by 1999 that windowhad closed.

More broadly, our study suggests that national iden-tity in postcommunist states (and, arguably, in any post-authoritarian society) forms primarily during temporallyand spatially limited critical junctures. By applying Bour-dieu’s concept of symbolic capital to struggles over mon-uments, our analysis also acknowledges the dominantrole of the state (or political elites) in the memorializa-tion process while not reducing the public to mere recip-ients of elite visions. As Levinson (1998) points out, theneed for commemorative vigilance in creating, redefin-ing, and maintaining monuments means that places ofmemory cannot be truly “written in stone.” Framingthe analysis of places of memory in terms of symboliccapital makes the public’s reception and readership of

monuments central to the creation of meaning, andmoves it beyond issues of both authorship and interpre-tation. As such, this characterization of conflicts overmonuments, memorials, and museums during critical junc-tures emphasizes the dynamic process of national identityformation, in which political elites, though powerful, nei-ther create identity free of historical and geographic con-straints nor impose identity on a passive public.

Acknowledgments

Both authors contributed equally to the research andwriting of this paper. The research was funded by anAnne U. White Grant from the Association of AmericanGeographers and a Regional Studies Grant from the Nel-son A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College. Theauthors would like to thank John Dunlop, Ron Suny,Karen Till, Michael Urban, participants in the RussianStudies Workshop at the University of Chicago, partici-pants in the Collaborative Research Network Workshopon “Official and Vernacular Identifications in the Makingof the Modern World” at Chiang Mai University (Thai-land), and four anonymous reviewers for their thoughtfulcomments on earlier drafts. In addition, we especiallythank Irina and Olga Kalina for their research assistancein Moscow.

Notes

1. All translations from the original Russian are by JulietJohnson.

2. National identity in post-Soviet Russia poses an especiallyinteresting set of questions because of the closely inter-twined histories of Russia and the USSR. Indeed, the evolu-tion of Russian national identity has attracted considerablepolitical and scholarly concern among political scientists inthe last ten years (e.g., Kommisrud and Svartdal 1992; Dun-lop 1993, 1993–1994; Rousselet 1994; Urban 1994, 1998;Chafetz 1997; Tolz 1998a, 1998b). However, few (e.g., K.Smith 1996) have specifically examined the role of monu-ments and memorials in constructing this identity. In con-trast, a number of works in geography and related disciplineshave used monuments, memorials, and public landscapes toevaluate the process of nation-building and the formation ofpolitical communities. With the notable exceptions of Si-dorov (2000) and Verdery (1999), however, they have not ex-amined this issue in Russia. (See, for example, Harvey 1979;Hershkovitz 1993; Young 1993; Gillis 1994; Heffernan 1995,1998; Johnson 1995; Foote 1997; Atkinson and Cosgrove1998; Koshar 1998; Leitner and Kang 1999; Till 1999.) Till(forthcoming) provides a summary and overview of the useof monuments and memorials for national commemorations.

3. Some cultural geographers emphasize the role of material, asopposed to symbolic, landscapes (Mitchell 1996). Such

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works argue that elites are principally concerned with thecontrol of material resources and labor, rather than with sym-bolic manipulation. In this view, landscapes should be inter-preted in terms of the underlying processes of exploitation,rather than narrowly in terms of their symbolic meanings.

4. The logic of symbolic capital can exist simultaneously withthe logic of market capital. In Bourdieu’s (1977) study, ex-changes within the “family” or immediate community arebased on honor and prestige rather than on material gain,although his subjects maintain a distinct set of norms forcommerce with strangers based on a more orthodox marketlogic. Likewise, we argue that political elites may use a logicof symbolic capital for monuments while simultaneouslyemploying instrumental political calculation.

5. For example, although many statues of Lenin were removedand otherwise contested in Moscow and St. Petersburg, heremains standing in most smaller, provincial Russian cities,towns, and villages.

6. For an explicitly geographical exploration of imperial na-tionalism in the Tsarist era, see Bassin (1999).

7. In theoretical terms, “civic nationalism” refers more broadlyto a nonethnic, inclusive nationalism without regard for re-gime type (i.e., a nationalism where all citizens who sharethe state’s ideals are considered to be members of the na-tion). In the Russian context, however, the inclusive So-viet-era civic-authoritarian nationalist idea based on uni-versal adherence to the principles of Marxism-Leninism hadbeen discredited as a state model. This left civic-democraticnationalism as the only viable, inclusive civic nationalist al-ternative during Russia’s critical juncture.

8. For example, the Moscow city government created an orga-nization called EKOS (the Expert and Consultative PublicCouncil), comprised of historians, artists, journalists, andother experts, to act as a “consultative body” to the city’sChief Architectural Agency. Its avowed goals, however,were unidirectional: “attracting the attention of the broadpublic to the issues of preserving everything with historicvalue as a foundation for reviving national traditions” (Vi-nogradov 1997). EKOS’s inability to protect the public in-terest by tempering Mayor Yurii Luzhkov’s own vision forMoscow became evident in the controversy over a trulyenormous, highly visible, and—as a result—highly unpopu-lar statue to Peter the Great sculpted by Luzhkov’s friendand chief artist Zurab Tsereteli. As Vinogradov (215) puts it(in a text otherwise extremely complementary to Luzhkovand his vision, and funded by the city government itself),

Unfortunately, in spite of multiple applications to theChief Architect of the city, EKOS was not provided withthe design materials on the monument . . . [T]he absenceof normal procedures of approvals and agreements on thiscomposition, at such an important place for the Moscowcity construction, leads to an . . . idea that in a democraticcountry the end should not be justified by just any means.

9. In the United States, there has been ongoing friction overwar memorials adjacent to the Mall in Washington, DC.Conflict has centered in particular on the strip of land be-tween the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memo-rial. The construction of the Vietnam War Memorial in theearly 1980s generated controversy over both the memorial’stragic, statue-less design and its placement so close to mon-uments glorifying American history and democracy. Morerecently, the decision to build a memorial to World War II

directly on the Mall has sparked artistic, political, and legalfights, with each side claiming that the site is too importantand sacred to include or to not include this monument.

10.

Russkii

refers to Russians as an ethnic group, while

rossiiskii

refers to citizens of the Russian Federation.11. These celebrations were often centered around Pushkin

Square or other sites associated with Pushkin, while Luzh-kov actually erected a new monument to the poet in centralMoscow just off Tverskaia street. Indeed, for a few weeks inthe summer of 1999, Luzhkov saturated Moscow with Push-kin’s image and with banners proclaiming well-knownPushkin verses.

12. The caption underneath a large color photograph of Luzh-kov and Aleksei II (the Patriarch of the Russian OrthodoxChurch) at the cathedral in one of the commemorative booksproduced for the anniversary celebration made it clear whodeserved credit for the work: “Moscow mayor Yurii Luzhkovtook the responsibility for the reconstruction of the Cathe-dral of Christ the Savior upon himself. Patriarch Aleksei IIblessed the construction workers” (Zhigailov 1996, 12).

13. The official resolution to erect a monument on Poklonnaiagora, “O sooruzhenii pamiatnika Pobedy v g. Moskve,” wasapproved by the presidium of the CPSU Central Commit-tee on 31 May 1957.

14. This led to a symbolic disjuncture between the park and themuseum, since the museum’s design and collection hadbeen created earlier (and because Luzhkov and the Moscowcity government had little control over the museum itself,in contrast to the park surrounding it). For example, theceiling in the museum’s Hall of Glory is lit by a chandelierin the shape of a Soviet star, and the Hall’s central figure isa massive, Soviet-style male statue.

15. The foundation charged with preserving Lenin’s remains,the Scientific Research Center of Biological Structures, stilladvocates its mission in “scientific” terms (Hearst 1999a).

16. Luzhkov’s own account (1996, 272–76) suggests that thestatue of Lenin in October Square remained untouched be-cause the cranes reached the square late at night after thecrowd had dispersed: “Then I decided to leave it standing.And I am sure that I did the right thing. All of these monu-ments—they are a part of our history . . . I am against rewrit-ing history.”

17. Only the display surrounding Stalin’s statue had obvious po-litical symbolism, and it is clearly an unusual case. Unlikethe other Soviet-era statues, the Stalin statue was disman-tled well before 1991. Like other statues of Stalin in Russia,it was removed from public display during the de-Staliniza-tion process under Khrushchev, and was reportedly buriedin the sculptor’s garden until it was “resuscitated” andplaced in the park in 1991 (Boym 2001). In 1998, artistEvgenii Chubarov donated a sculpture group symbolizingthe gulag to the Park of Arts, which was erected surroundingStalin. A three-meter wall formed of crudely rendered stoneheads behind lines of barbed wire framed the Stalin statue,which then faced a one-meter high triangular pile of headsin the same style. Other “gulag” figures by the same artistwere added later. Although we found the symbolism ratherpowerful and effective, when we interviewed several sculp-tors working in the park, they dismissed the display as thatof an “amateur” artist who did not deserve the recognitionaccorded to professionals.

18. We had initially expected to find variations in the responsesof visitors among the different sites (reflecting the attrac-

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Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow 545

tion of different types of monuments to different groups),but in practice we found few significant variations. The sur-veys contained basic demographic questions (including sex,age, place of birth, nationality, education and occupation),several structured questions to assess the frequency and pur-pose of the respondent’s visit (including a final, open-endedquestion, “Why did you come here today?”), and questionsto measure political party and religious affiliation. We alsoasked our subjects to respond (“Strongly Agree”; “Agree”;“Neutral”; “Disagree”; “Strongly Disagree”) to six state-ments regarding contemporary political and social develop-ments, to measure political attitudes and nationalistic senti-ments. We conducted the survey on three separate days(including at least one Saturday or Sunday) at each of ourthree primary study sites and also administered the survey atthe Park of Arts on one weekday as a control. We instructedour administrators to approach visitors at random using var-ious techniques (e.g., asking every third or fifth person,using random walks, and so on), and to solicit responsesonly from Russian citizens. At least one of the authors re-mained in the area unobtrusively to ensure that the admin-istrators followed the appropriate technique and to answerany questions that arose during the process. We spot-checked the representativeness of our samples by indepen-dently calculating the gender ratio of visitors and compar-ing it to the ratio in the surveys. (There were no significantdifferences.) It is difficult to estimate the sample proportionat the different sites, although we were able to do so at theLenin Mausoleum (2.4 percent) on one of our sample daysby counting the number of visitors entering the line (about3,500) during the three-hour survey period. The sample sizewas slightly smaller at Victory Park and the former VDNKh,and considerably larger (perhaps 80 percent) at the Park ofArts. The refusal rate was similar at the four sites, generallybelow 20 percent, although it was somewhat higher for par-ticular questions. Our survey administrators thought thatmost of those who refused simply did not want to take thetime to complete the form. Copies of the original survey in-strument can be obtained from the authors.

19. The most popular holiday, New Year’s Day, does not holdany particular religious or political significance. Like theLenin Mausoleum, the low-ranked Revolution Day marksthe October Revolution of 1917 and is therefore a con-tested commemoration. A poll of 1,600 Russians by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion on the eveof 7 November 1998 revealed that only 39 percent consid-ered the date to be a holiday. However, the holiday hadmore significance for older Russians: those over 55 were fourtimes more likely to express that opinion than those under25 (Interfax 1998). Yeltsin attempted unsuccessfully to re-cast Revolution Day in more civic terms by renaming it the“Day of Reconciliation and Accord.”

20. Moscow residents did express slightly more negative opin-ions toward the rebuilding effort: only 64 percent approved,while 21 percent disapproved. It is possible that relatively moreMuscovites would have preferred the pool over the church, orit may represent local resentment against Luzhkov. In eithercase, it suggests how nonlocal residents may view “local” mon-umentalization efforts more positively than do local residents.

21. Interestingly, many of the respondents favoring burial toldour surveyors that it was “un-Christian” to leave the bodyunburied, and that being displayed in the mausoleum wascontrary to Lenin’s own wishes.

22. As one Russian observer noted, in glorifying the Russianpast, “Yurii Luzhkov hasn’t come up with any new principle.He follows the same path that Stalin did during the criticalsituation in the war . . . [E]xactly in that moment, all thehistory of Russia became the history of the USSR” (Borisov1999, 43).

23. In a direct affront to Luzhkov’s power to control publicspace, in March 2001 the Putin administration’s Ministry ofCulture and Ministry of Property both declared that siteswith “federal significance” in Moscow should be transferredfrom local to federal control by December, an order thatLuzhkov vigorously fought (Clark 2001; Kabanova 2001;Polinin and Anisimov 2001).

24. It says, “The society ‘Memorial’ was especially nominated toprovide this stone from the territory of the Solovetskii campand to erect it in memory of the millions of victims of thetotalitarian regime. 30 October 1990.” The faint inscriptionon the stone’s pedestal forces visitors to come close to thestone and look very carefully to read the words.

25. It had been celebrated as a holiday since 1991, and declaredan official state holiday in 1994 despite significant objec-tions from the KPRF and others who considered it a daycelebrating Yeltsin’s personal triumph rather than Russianindependence.

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Correspondence: Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, e-mail: ben.forest@dartmouth.edu (Forest); Depart-ment of Political Science, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL 60626, e-mail: jjohns@luc.edu (Johnson).

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