Lessons From Post-Soviet Union Berlin
Lessons From Post-Soviet Union Berlin: Monuments, Memorials, and Narratives Fueling President Putin’s Attacks on Ukraine
Silas Sabado McClung
Abstract
What is the controversy surrounding the Soviet War Memorials in Berlin, and how does it relate to President Putin's invasion of Ukraine? This paper enters this discourse and how the two largest Soviet War Memorials in Berlin's Tiergarten and Treptower Park contributed to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin's justification of his invasion of Ukraine by propagating a national narrative constructed after World War II and continued but contested in the present day.
It has been a little over a year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked an interstate movement across Eastern Europe, particularly Poland and the Baltic states, advocating and implementing the dismantling of hundreds of monuments, statues, and other iconography connected to the former Soviet Union (Higgins). However, the removal or relocation of Soviet monuments and memorials to Red Army forces in former outposts of the Soviet Union comes with one notable exception: Germany. Although most Germans oppose Russia’s war in Ukraine, Germany must maintain over 400 Soviet monuments and memorials across the eastern formerly Soviet-occupied country per the terms and conditions of its 1990 unification treaty, also known as the Two Plus Four Agreement (Fürstenau). In Germany’s capital, Berlin, this agreement and the interstate movement against Sovietconography have come to the forefront of public discourse (see Der Tagesspiegel) as two of the most significant Soviet War Memorials outside of Russia— those dedicated to the Battle of Berlin—are located respectively in the Treptower Park and the Tiergarten. [1]
The two Soviet War Memorials in the Tiergarten, reportedly 2,500 buried there, and Treptower Park, 7,000 buried there, commemorate the 80,000 Red Army Forces who lost their lives in the World War II Battle for Berlin. Supporters of the two Soviet War Memorials argue that those memorialized are the entire Soviet Union: Ukrainians, Belorussians, and others, not only Russians, although pro-Russian rallies do occur there, and that Germany must uphold the Two Plus Four Agreement (IDCommunism; Krane). Proponents highlight that they deserve to stay because Germany started World War II, killing 27 million people in the Soviet Union, including 8 million Ukrainians, so people should remember and honour the Soviet’s sacrifice and liberation (Fürstenau).
Opponents of the two Soviet War Memorials, such as Stefanie Bung, a lawmaker in the Berlin state parliament, call on the German government to dismantle the Soviet artillery and tanks in the Tiergarten, arguing that these are symbols of violence, not peace (Fürstenau). The fact that the Soviet Union no longer exists and that the Two Plus Four treaty Germany holds today is now with Russia, a different political regime carrying out a brutal war on Ukraine, means that, as Bung contends, “the political conditions have fundamentally changed” (Fürstenau). Moreover, these two Soviet War Memorials in Berlin contribute to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin’s justification of his invasion of Ukraine by propagating a national narrative constructed after World War II and continued but contested in the present day.
To better understand this nationally constructed narrative and the controversy surrounding these two Soviet War Memorials in Berlin, I must first define President Putin’s relevant historical claims for his invasion of Ukraine. On February 24th, 2022, during a televised address to the Russian people, President Putin invoked the Soviet Union’s post-World War II liberator narrative, that of the Great Patriotic War. This Soviet-constructed narrative of history claims that the Soviet Union fought a defensive war for their homeland in World War II. As President Putin asserts, the USSR did not seek to provoke Nazi Germany and refrained until the last second to prevent the war but inevitably defended itself from an imminent attack, having lost a strategic advantage and millions of lives (President of Russia, 2022). Thus, President Putin states that Russia, as the claimed successor of the Soviet Union, will not make this mistake the second time. President Putin asserts that the sacrifices of Russians to defeat Nazism are sacred and that their great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and defend their common Motherland to allow, as he describes it, neo-Nazis in Ukraine to seize power.
President Putin uses the nationalist myth of the Great Patriotic War, as Thomas Erikson in the book Nations and Nationalism might say, to show the trials and tribulations that the Soviet Union, and from their ashes, Russia has undergone as a right of passage to fight its present adversaries (139). President Putin selected and reinterpreted revisionist and ideologue aspects of Soviet Union culture and history to fit into the legitimation of Russia’s particular power constellation and subsequent invasion (Erikson 145). That means President Putin is portraying his current operation as the Great Patriotic War’s successor, mobilizing the Russian people and liberating Ukraine of Nazis as the Soviet Union did in Germany during World War II.
What is particularly contentious about President Putin’s narrative is that it intentionally forgets the Soviet Union’s aggressive, not defensive, invasion of Poland in 1939, less than a month after signing a non-aggression pact with Germany. Also, the Red Army Forces, including Ukrainians and Belarussians, not just Russians, annexed other parts of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, another glaring omission is explicit crimes against women: some of these Soviet liberation soldiers mass raped millions of women during World War II, a significant number in Germany (Beevor). These intentional erasures from the Soviet-constructed narrative are evident in the two Soviet War Memorials in Berlin, which were used as sites of memory to cement a historical misconstruing of facts in the living spaces and the hearts and minds of many Eastern Germans and Russians for generations to come (Winter 312). Using the vocabulary of Jay Winter from the book Sites of Memory, the commemoration of these two Soviet War Memorials in Berlin serves the broader community in that the moment recalled is significant and informed by a moral message, a Soviet-constructed liberation narrative (313). The two Soviet War Memorials then materialize that message (Winter 313).
As researcher Collins Alexander describes, the Soviet victory in the Battle of Berlin demonstrated the communist’s victory over fascism leading to the Soviet imposition of policy, ideology, and the Great Patriotic War narrative onto the East German population, which impacted the planning of memorials in Berlin (Alexander 41). In 1945, the first Soviet War Memorial built in the British sector of the Tiergarten, only three months after the end of World War II, also signalled to the West that the Soviets had liberated Berlin. In 1949, nearly four years after World War II, the Soviets erected the second War Memorial further in the Soviet sector of Berlin Treptower Park. These two Soviet War Memorials in Berlin served “a similar purpose in imposing Soviet sacrifice, victory, and superiority, though they do so [differently]” (Alexander 41).
The immediate planning and construction of the Soviet War Memorial in the centrally located Tiergarten, a stone’s throw from the historically significant Bundestag and Brandenburg Tor, sent a clear message of Soviet political and military domination. The two T-34 tanks and artillery pieces in front of the memorial emphasize this military aspect and in the symbolic spot of Albert Speer’s Nazi “victory avenue,” and as Brian Ladd notes, Hohenzollerns’ statue laden Victory Boulevard (194). The Soviet Union then used the site for generations as a place for state commemoration, including wreath laying and Victory in Europe Day celebrations, reminding East Germans of the Soviet liberation and political dominance in Berlin.
The Treptower Park memorial served a different educative purpose through its location, commemoration, inscriptions, and time since it was built a few years after the Battle for Berlin. The Soviet War Memorial located in far East German territory, in conjunction with the ritualization and ceremonial practices, helped alter the perception of it[2], as Courtney Crimmins described, “...from that of a Soviet-specific construction to one which embodies the core of East German foundational mythology” (27). Crimmins continues that “the GDR’ myth of anti-fascism,’ which argued that East Germans were not heirs to the Hitler legacy but rather to the socialist revolutionaries of Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin” (17). The Treptower Soviet War Memorial, marked in Russian and German, contrasts with the Tiergarten, which has only Russian, and thus invites and reeducates the Eastern German population to understand the Soviet message (Alexander 42).
Nevertheless, the Tiergarten and Treptower Park sites celebrate Soviet heroism and liberation and serve as pilgrimage places for Russians, and President Putin has visited both. In short, these two Soviet War Memorials continually imposed the idea of liberation, attempting to shape East German identity by advancing the common postwar Soviet agenda of the Great Patriotic War narrative. I conclude that President Putin weaponizes this Great Patriotic War narrative physically constructed, supported, and imposed by these two Soviet War Memorials to justify his invasion of Ukraine. I believe that the German government and population must play a more active role in taking responsibility for and discussing the implications of this equally important but often overlooked aspect of the Soviet Union’s liberation during World War II and this narrative’s use by President Putin.
Notes
[1] Sovietconography is a term I made to define monuments, places, names, and other symbols of the former Soviet Union. It is also important to note that I could not find substantive scholarship focusing on Soviet iconography as a term. I believe this could be because of different language usage by the scholars investigating this field.
[2] For example, the Soviet Union even invited East Germans to submit designs for the memorial (Alexander 42).
Silas Sabado McClung is an undergraduate student at Sewanee, The University of the South.
Works Cited
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Picture: “West Berlin 1990 - Soviet War Memorial In The Tiergarten.” by https://www.flickr.com/photos/54238124@N00
