EFFECTUAL EFFIGIES

The Controversy Over St. Petersburg’s Historicized Heroism

By David Plotz

On St. Petersburg’s Vasilievsky Island, on Bolshoy Prospect, just a short walk from my favorite Indian restaurant, there is a statue of Lenin.  There’s another one in front of Finland Station on Vyborg Side, across the Neva River from the neighborhood where I go to school. In that neighborhood, within a block of the Smolny Monastery and Institute, one can still find statues of Lenin, Marx, Engels, and, most peculiarly, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka (later known as the NKVD, and still later as the KGB). A student at Smolny walking after class down Suvorovsky will pass ten consecutive numbered Soviet Streets before reaching Nevsky Prospect, the main thoroughfare of the city that bore Lenin’s name for most of the twentieth century.

Of course, now everyone refers to this city by the name of its founder, Peter the Great, who is at least equally well represented by statues and monuments in the central part of town. Peter, who founded this city in an attempt to modernize and westernize Russia, is the focus of one of the most famous monuments in the city, the Bronze Horseman charging forward into the Neva in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. A recent magazine poll showed that more than half of Russians consider the era of Peter the Great to be the greatest in Russian history.

There are no statues of Stalin anywhere in St. Petersburg, but not for lack of affection for the man who once ruled the Soviet Union as a virtual god.  The number of Russians who feel either kindly or ambivalently disposed toward Stalin probably constitutes a slight majority, and many of them are not shy about saying so. The fact that Stalin is nowhere to be seen is the legacy of his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, who cemented his own power in the Communist Party by discrediting and banning all traces of the Stalinist regime he once served.  If Khrushchev had left even one statue of Stalin standing, I have a feeling it would still be here today.

The meaning of these statues was recently the source of a heated debate among the American students at the Smolny Institute. Most students agreed that the memory of Peter the Great ought to be honored, and that the memory of Stalin ought to be shunned, but there was no clear consensus about Lenin. A significant number of students, particularly those of the conservative political persuasion, consider it abominable that Lenin or any other communist continues to be held in the same esteem as Russia’s greatest czars or poets. One student, following a terribly predictable line of thought, suggested that it was as bad as if a statue of Hitler still stood in Berlin.

Most Petersburgers today are not particularly fans of Lenin or of communism, but would nonetheless bristle at this comparison. For the older generation, which endured starvation, disease, and bitter cold during a nine-hundred day siege by the Nazis, this city will always be Leningrad. It may be difficult for Americans, who are prone to conflating communism and Nazism into a single evil called totalitarianism, to understand the mentality of a people who sacrificed 25 million lives under the communist banner in order to defeat the Nazis. But regardless, one doesn’t have to be a local or a communist to understand that there is a wide gulf separating the crimes of Lenin and the early Bolsheviks from the crimes of Hitler or, for that matter, Stalin.

The real question is whether a similarly wide gulf separates the crimes of Lenin from those of Peter the Great, or any of the other major czars honored in St. Petersburg. This is where the issue of historical memory becomes supplanted by ideology.  Many Russians, and many Americans who have devoted their semester to studying Russia, seem to share a highly romantic view of the czars. “Of course Peter the Great should be memorialized,” argued one student, “He founded this city and built Russia into a great power.” Well, yes, though this overlooks the tens of thousands of lives lost in building a city with slave labor in the middle of a frozen swamp, the highly centralized and oppressive feudal system Peter introduced that outlasted him by a century and a half, and the three centuries of heated controversy in Russian intellectual circles over whether or not Peter’s reforms were justified. Imperial czarist was not exactly a benevolent institution; how else to explain the revolution that brought Lenin to power? For my part, I seriously doubt that that my family would even live in America if not for the reign of Tsar Alexander III and the massive pogroms he encouraged, which continued until the Bolsheviks.

Russia is hardly the only country in the world whose national heroes include violent and morally dubious men. Certainly America is not immune from this problem.  But removing statuary can be an even more blatantly political statement than erecting it. A statue, after all, is a testimony to the history of a place.  To tear a statue down is to attempt to blot out the memory of whatever it represents, much as Stalin himself used to erase purged party members from photographs. In today’s St. Petersburg, one can walk alongside statues of Peter and of Lenin, cheerfully ignoring either or both if one wishes. To suddenly remove all the communists while leaving the czars standing would be to pass a sudden judgment on Russia’s history, not only demonizing the communist period and the many residents who still have mixed feelings about it, but just as importantly elevating czarism into something more noble and heroic. And Russia’s history is far too complex for such a simplistic ideological display.

There is an anecdote that Lenin did not actually want to be commemorated with statues, claiming that “they only gather bird shit.”  Maybe so, but they also gather memories, and the memory of communism is now as important a part of St. Petersburg’s history as the more distant memory of the czars. Russians will not achieve inner peace by editing their own history; they can only hope to learn from it, and ultimately to try to build a better system on the ruins of two older systems that failed. Otherwise, a century from now American students will be traveling eight time zones away from home to argue about whether or not Russians should tear down the statues of Putin.

David Plotz is majoring in history and he is currently studying abroad in St. Petersburg.