In succeeding the USSR, the Russian Federation inherited its diplomatic real estate, nuclear weapons, Security Council seat, and space program. But it also had to take possession of Lenin, Stalin, the Gulag, the Great Terror, the Holodomor, and the mass rapes.

Questioning War Monuments

by Alexander J. Motyl

You think the monument wars in Ukraine take the cake, think again. The Polish city of Gdansk is in the throes of a controversy over a statue of a Red Army soldier raping a woman. It was installed on October 12th, on the city’s Victory Avenue, and uninstalled the next day for having been set up without a legal permit.


Here’s how the Moscow Times reported the brouhaha:

The offending work of art, entitled “Komm Frau,” German for “Come Here Woman,” had been installed on Gdansk’s Avenue of Victory on Saturday. Polish authorities removed the statue on Sunday, saying that it had been put there illegally, while Szumczyk was brought in for questioning by the police before being released, Polish Radio reported.

The sculptor, fifth-year art student Jerzy Szumczyk, said he “was unable to cope” with the accounts he read about rape by Soviet servicemen as they advanced toward Berlin in 1944 and 1945, and felt compelled to express his feelings.

“I am deeply outraged by the stunt by a Gdansk Fine Arts Academy student, who has defiled by his pseudo-art the memory of 600,000 Soviet servicemen who gave their lives in the fight for the freedom and the independence of Poland,” Russian ambassador Alexander Alexeyev said in a statement Tuesday.

“We consider the installation of the statue as an expression of hooliganism, marked by an explicitly blasphemous nature,” Alexeyev said. “The vulgar statue on the city’s main street insults not only the feelings of Russians, but of all clear-headed people who remember to whom they owe their liberation from the Nazis.”

What made Szumczyk’s monument especially disturbing to his critics was its placement—right next to a Soviet T-34 tank intended to symbolize the city’s liberation. The placement was, of course, an intentional provocation. As Szumczyk said: “It’s a work from the heart. The idea came from the fact that the city’s monuments are often in places where they shouldn’t stand. Some monuments don’t fit their surroundings, because great crimes took place there. We barely appreciate what the monuments represent.”

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