Soviet war memorials: the case of the Victory Monument in Kaliningrad

LTStraipsnyje analizuojamas Pergalės monumentas Kaliningrade – vienas ankstyviausių sovietų karo memorialų, skirtų Raudonosios Armijos kovoms Antrajame pasauliniame kare pažymėti, kurį realizavo sovietų reokupuotos Lietuvos skulptorių komanda. Tekste remiamasi maždaug 1970 m. dailininko ir ryškaus sovietinės kultūros veikėjo Vytauto Mackevičiaus rašytais prisiminimais apie šio komplekso statybas, aptariami kiti Sovietų Sąjungos užkariautose teritorijose iškilę Antrojo pasaulinio karo memorialiniai kompleksai. Siekiant išnarplioti ideologines Kaliningrado monumento potekstes ir atskleisti platesnę sovietų monumentaliosios propagandos programą, dėmesys kreipiamas į ideologizuotą vadinamojo Didžiojo Tėvynės karo naratyvą. Galiausiai, sparčios komplekso statybos interpretuojamos kaip Lietuvos ir Karaliaučiaus intensyvios sovietizacijos pradžios ženklas. [Iš leidinio]

ENWith the terror of the Second World War still looming over European cities, Soviet functionaries did not lose time to start legitimizing their version of the war narrative in the public space and began to build monuments to the heroic deeds of the Red Army and the Soviet victory against fascism. One of the most interesting structures of this type was erected in 1945 in the former capital of Prussia, Königsberg. In 1945, this German city along with the northern part of East Prussia was transferred under the Soviet administration according to the agreements of the Potsdam Conference. In 1946, Königsberg, “The King’s City”, named in honour of the Bohemian ruler Otokar II, was renamed as Kaliningrad to venerate the Soviet party figure Mikhail Kalinin who passed away on June 3, 1946. The Victory Memorial in Kaliningrad, also known as the Monument to 1,200 Guardsmen, was designed by two Soviet architects, Sergey Nanushyan (Сергей Нанушьян) who had Georgian ancestry like Stalin, and the Russian Inokentyi Melchyakov (Иннокентий Мельчаков), in cooperation with a group of sculptors headed by the Lithuanian sculptor Juozas Mikėnas. This complex is important in the history of commemoration of the Second World War (further abbreviated as WWII), but not for its artistic solutions – the context of its creation reflects the aims of Soviet ideology to Sovietize the occupied territories and establish the narrative of the so-called Great Patriotic War (further abbreviated as GPW) that would show it in a favourable light. In this text, the Victory Monument in Kaliningrad is analyzed in the contexts of Soviet monumental propaganda and the ideologization of the history of WWII.The research was prompted by coming across the memoirs of the artist and Soviet cultural figure Vytautas Mackevičius on the circumstances of its construction, written ca. 1970, in the Lithuanian Literature and Art Archives (further abbreviated as LLMA). While working on the paper on the propaganda visual narrative of WWII in Soviet Lithuanian art, which is one of the sources for this text, I tried to keep in mind that the Kaliningrad monument was one of the first complexes built in commemoration of the Soviet victory, and up until the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) it remained probably the most distinct example of monumental sculpture of Soviet Lithuania (The Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, further LSSR). After the restoration of Independence in Lithuania in 1990, due to its content steeped in Soviet ideology, the monument fell into oblivion and found itself on the margins of art research. Correspondingly, the study of the case of this obsolete ideological artwork can serve two purposes: 1) to reveal the wider problematics of the formation of Soviet historical memory in the occupied territories of Central Eastern Europe, and 2) to revisit the perception of postwar art heritage. Keywords: Second World War, Great Patriotic War, Königsberg-Karaliaučius-Kaliningrad, war memorials, Sovietization. [Extract, p. 179-181]