Then Marx came tumbling down ...
By Dmitry Shlapentokh
Officials from Moscow's Committee for Monumental Arts recently discussed plans
to remove what is the only monument of Karl Marx in the city, putting forward a
variety of arguments.
The most frequently used argument was that the German Marx (1818-1883) - the
philosopher, political economist and political theorist whose ideas are
credited as the foundation of modern communism - never visited the Russian
capital. For this reason, it was said, his monument, in a plaza facing the
Bolshoi Theater in central Moscow, was out of place.
The sculpture is a bust of Marx rising from a massive granite block, which is
inscribed with the famous slogan from the Communist Manifesto, "Workers of the
World Unite". Sculpted by
Lev Kerbel, it was placed in 1961.
One of the participants in the discussion proclaimed the reason the statue
should be removed was that Marx's presence in Moscow was disturbing from all
aspects, including, he implied, an ideological one.
A war on monuments continues to be waged throughout the entire post-Soviet
space, where history is hastily being rearranged to suit the needs of the
present.
In Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, a bronze effigy of Soviet soldiers was
removed in 2007 because it was considered a symbol of the oppressive Soviet
empire, or of the Russians, the vicious Asiatics who for a while controlled the
Estonians - a peaceful and bonafide European people.
In addition, the bones of the Soviet soldiers beneath the monument were plucked
from their graves and together with the monument transferred to a distant
cemetery. The removal led to a strong diplomatic protest from Russia and riots
by Russian-speaking minorities in Tallinn.
Similarly in Georgia, after the August 2008 war with Russia, Joseph Stalin lost
his "Georgianess" and was seen by government as the very embodiment of Russian
imperialism - from which, it is now claimed, Georgia suffered for centuries. A
huge effigy of Stalin in the eastern city of Gori - his place of birth -
suffered an ignominious end last month.
Until recently, it had been a point of pride for Gori residents and, in fact,
all Georgians, that Stalin was born in their midst. Georgians fiercely defended
the monument when former president Nikita Khrushchev tried to remove it during
the de-Stalinization era of the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. But by this
August, it had become a blemish for democratic Georgia, the good friend of the
West. Consequently, the statue has been moved to the former Stalin Museum, now
the Museum of Russian Occupation.
Similar events occurred in Moscow at the beginnings of the post-Soviet era in
the early 1990s. Moscow authorities still disfigure the historical face of the
city by erasing landmarks - the famous Hotel Moskva in Moscow's downtown was
among their recent victims - but they do this for greed (each square meter is
valuable), not for ideological reasons.
Anyone arguing that the Marx statue should be removed could claim that the
economic crisis had made Marx's ideas popular once again, and that the monument
could inspire the masses to a repetition of the socialist revolution of circa
1905-1917.
The authorities continue to be visibly nervous about this, and when in one
television debate a participant dared to state that people should take to the
streets to defend their rights, the program was quickly ended by the moderator.
In March, when a small aluminum factory town, Pikalevo, near St Petersburg, had
a strike, it was covered by national news and Moscow was directly involved in
breaking the industrial action.
If a socialist revolution is just the pipedream of a few old-timers, what are
the authorities so afraid of? Why is the image of Marx so disturbing for them?
The point is that, while the dreams of the socialist revolution are pretty much
dead, this could also be said about the authorities' pet ideological project -
underway since the start of former president Vladimir Putin's tenure - of a
strong Russian state "rising to its feet".
Russia as a unified, centralized state has become irrelevant for provincial
folk - the masses and the elite alike. The country's disintegration, de facto
or even de jure, would be accepted quietly and even cheerfully by quite a few.
During a recent train trip to Russia's northeast, this author became acquainted
with an ex-officer of the Red Army, now a poor retiree. Together, we watched
the landscape, which could well have been from a popular American TV
documentary series Life After People, which describes what would happen
to Earth after humanity disappeared. This part of provincial Russia, with its
fields neglected and covered by bushes, ruined houses and abandoned
construction sites, could well be used in the series.
Watching all of this, the officer told me that he had experienced personal
anguish when he saw the Soviet Union collapse, and that he had wished former
presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were executed for treason. But
now he does not even care what happens to the Russian state, and believes that
the majority of the population would accept its disintegration without much of
a problem.
It is not just Russia's poor who are oblivious to the fate of the state.
Well-to-do businessmen from Krasnoiarsk province in eastern Siberia cheerfully
supported the recently raised notion that Krasnoiarsk province should be
independent from Moscow. Provincial folk not only have no love for Moscow, they
may even prefer foreign states. During protests last year in Vladivostok
against tariffs introduced by Moscow on imported Japanese cars, some
demonstrators carried Japanese fags.
Moscow understands the profound spiritual vacuum, the fragility, not so much of
the social-economic order, of the peculiar Russian brand of capitalism, but of
the state itself. It is this feeling of the fragility of the state that pushes
them to get rid of Marx, by getting rid of his statue.
While the authorities contemplate how to remove the huge slab of granite from
downtown Moscow, they have reintroduced another fallen idol from the
revolutionary era: Stalin. One might wonder why Stalin became better than Marx
in the eyes of officials. Many aspects of Stalinism hardly please the Russian
elite; and this is the reason why excerpts from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The
Gulag Archipelago became required reading in Russian high schools.
Still, Stalinism has one great ideological asset in the eyes of Russian
authorities - praise of the "vertical of power", the worship of the state. And
this is one of the major reasons why his name has reappeared in a slogan newly
inscribed in a refurbished Moscow metro station. The patriotic appeal and
imperial nostalgia of refined and redefined Stalinism says nothing to
provincial folk - the masses and the elite alike - but one could argue that
their protests are feeble and that the authorities could well ignore them.
Still, while the pressure from below is weak, the state could be even weaker.
During the mentioned protests in Vladivostok, Moscow faced a peculiar
solidarity of residents, local elite and the police - who refused to beat up
protesters. Moscow was compelled to bring riot police from the center. But, if
this violence were to emerge simultaneously in several places, Moscow would not
be able to muster enough forces.
To be sure, the existing order, if no shake-up happens, could survive for
generations, but in the face of serious problems, the state could crumble quite
quickly. It is this subconscious feeling of Russia's fragility which makes the
granite statue of Marx so irritating in the eyer of the authorities.
Dmitry Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of history, College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend. He is author of
East Against West: The First Encounter - The Life of Themistocles, 2005.
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Similarly in Georgia, after the August 2008 war with Russia, Joseph Stalin lost
his "Georgianess" and was seen by government as the very embodiment of Russian
imperialism - from which, it is now claimed, Georgia suffered for centuries. A
huge effigy of Stalin in the eastern city of Gori - his place of birth -
suffered an ignominious end last month.
