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ICS0010.1177/1367877919885950International Journal of Cultural StudiesPreda

International Journal of Cultural Studies

2020, Vol. 23(3) 401­–421
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1367877919885950
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877919885950
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Article
The transnational
‘memorialization’ of
monumental socialist public
works in Eastern Europe

Caterina Preda
Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest, Romania

Abstract
This article analyses how three types of artistic memorialization of monumental socialist public
works transform these into examples of socialist modernism in Eastern Europe. First, it tackles the
issue of rendering socialist architecture visible through the Socialist Modernism online platform.
Second, it focuses on the collection of documentary proofs by six documentary photography
projects in Eastern Europe. Finally, it looks at how four contemporary artists in Bulgaria, Romania,
Lithuania, and the Czech Republic are resignifying socialist art in their artistic practices. Analysed
from a perspective of transnational cultural memory practices, these three artistic endeavours
contribute to a shared approach to the monumental socialist public works in the region. I argue
that some of these strategies lead to a unified, depoliticized, decommunized memorialization of
the socialist art of Eastern Europe.

Keywords
decommunized, memorialization, socialist modernism, socialist monuments, transnational

The public spaces of Eastern European countries remain saturated with socialist relics.
Whether in the form of buildings, monuments, statues, or mosaics, these material proofs of
the communist past are still in place. While numerous material signs of the communist
regimes were hastily removed immediately after 1989, others were abandoned and have
been recently rediscovered or resignified by various cultural agents. This article discusses
current pan-European processes of recuperation, preservation, and reassessment of Socialist

Corresponding author:
Caterina Preda, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bucharest, Calea Plevnei 59, Bucharest, Romania.
Email: caterinapreda@gmail.com
402 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(3)

Realist monuments and monumentalism as part of a strategy to present them as a decom-

munized, depoliticized version of socialist art. By ‘decommunized’, I mean that these
monuments are no longer seen as an expression of the former communist regimes, but as
pure aesthetic objects that are not defined by the political context in which they were cre-
ated. In Eastern Europe, after three decades dominated by iconoclasm and strategies to
erase the communist past and its relics, various counter-hegemonic initiatives have recently
developed with the purpose of conserving and re-evaluating socialist monuments.
This study examines three such enterprises, which reflect transnational trends across
Europe. First, it looks at the ‘Socialist Modernism’ platform, part of the Socialist Heritage
initiative launched in 2014 by the Romanian-based Bureau for Art and Urban Research
(BACU) as part of the International Council for Monuments and Sites initiatives
(ICOMOS – ISC20C). This project advocates for the safeguarding of Eastern European
and Central Asian buildings and artworks as historic monuments, including examples of
socialist modernist architecture alongside parks, squares and monuments created between
1955 and 1989/91.
Second, it discusses six documentary photography projects, some of them published
after being shared on social media (Facebook, Instagram). They include: Socialist
Modernism – Archaeology of an Era (2011) by Roman Bezjak; the Protect Public Space
project (begun in 2017) of Jakub Charousek and Frantisek Zachoval, which documents
public monuments in Romania and the Czech Republic; Martin Maleschka’s GDR
Construction-related Art: Art in Public Spaces 1950–1990 (2018); Yevgen Nikiforov
et al.’s Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics (2017); and finally the documentation
of Spomeniks (roughly, ‘war memorials’) in Yugoslavia, produced by Jan Kempenaers
(2006–9) and Donald Niebyl et al.’s (2018) Spomenik Monument Database.
Finally, it will consider the work of four contemporary visual artists who focus on the
recuperation and reinterpretation of socialist monuments in Eastern Europe. Nikola
Mihov’s project Forget Your Past (2009–12) documented more than a hundred socialist
monuments in Bulgaria that have been abandoned and neglected. In Lithuania, Deimantas
Narkevicius’ Once in the XX Century (2004; see Glover, 2017) uses a reversed video to
return the statue of Lenin to its plinth, from which it was removed in 1991. In Romania,
with Dead Weights (2013), Ciprian Mureșan (see Mousse Magazine, 2016) questioned
how remnants of the past could be recovered by creating an installation of 18 sculptures,
replicas of those in the National Museum of Art in Cluj. Finally, in the Czech Republic,
David Černý’s Pink Tank (1991) resignified a Soviet monument that had remained in
place post-1990.
These three endeavours will be analysed in light of the argument that while socialist
realist art was erased from the national artistic canon (and socialist monuments were
abandoned), it is also the subject of transnational initiatives towards revalorization and
preservation. In these narratives, socialist art is resignified: it becomes no longer the
expression of ideologized socialist realism but a part of socialist modernism(s) – a depo-
liticized, aestheticized version of socialist monuments.
I argue that these monumental public works are treated differently by the three types
of initiative analysed here. If the first and second types consider them purely from an
aesthetic standpoint in an act of purposeful decommunization, the artistic interventions
still regard these relics as relevant political objects.
Preda 403

These three strategies are diverse in their practices and motivations. In the first case,
documenting and making an inventory of public monuments organizes information
about the socialist monuments in order to safeguard their existence. Second, the recu-
peration and preservation of this built patrimony aims to create a photographic record in
order to promote the aesthetic value of these relicts, to revalorize the area’s socialist
heritage; in this case the motivation could be related to a renewed interest in the socialist
past as a reaction to what is perceived as the failure of democratization after 1989. The
approach used is not always nostalgic, as it is often those from the younger generation,
with little – if any – direct experience of the communist regimes, who engage in this type
of endeavour. Finally, artists propose a resignification of socialist public monuments
using different tactics: they are revealed as valuable, as opposed to the invisibility
imposed by the transition to democracy, or their status is questioned, but they are not
seen as apolitical or de-ideologized. Artists problematize the presence of these monu-
ments and the role that they still play. Thus, if the first two examples can be considered
part of a recent trend to look back at the communist past through a depoliticized lens, the
third questions the significance and presence of the socialist heritage.
While there are obvious differences between socialist monumental works, public
buildings and public monuments compared to other forms of public design (mosaics,
fountains, etc.), the projects discussed in this article consider them as part of the same
group. Thus, I have chosen also to discuss them together, as part of the same effort to
create a registry of a common public socialist aesthetic. They are discussed here as
socialist relicts, that is, as material proofs of the communist past that are still standing,
although neglected, marginalized or rendered invisible.
This article argues that the examples discussed constitute memorialization of the
communist past, as they propose looking back at the material remains of that past from a
de-ideologized perspective, which takes the formal characteristics into consideration
while ignoring the socio-political context. It goes on to propose including the artistic
gestures discussed in the third section as a more complex approach to these relicts, which
through artistic intervention are contextualized and given back their political agency.

The transnational study of the memory of socialist art as

socialist modernism
Since 1990, the study of the demise of the communist regimes in Eastern and Central
Europe from a political science perspective has included analyses of the processes of tran-
sition and democratization, the measures of Transitional Justice (TJ), post-communist
transformations of societies, and the study of communist legacies (Horne and Stan, 2018;
Pridham, 2014; Simpser et al., 2018; Stan, 2009). TJ studies of the post-communist regimes
have tended to look at the criminalization of the communist past through trials, truth com-
missions and other public forms of condemnation. Additionally, for political history or
cultural history studies, the interest in the communist past has included analysis of the dif-
ferent forms of the memory of communism and its diverse realms, with foci ranging from
nostalgia to the analysis of anti-communist memorial practices (Dimou et al., 2014).
While several countries in the region have condemned communism as a criminal
regime (the Czech Republic in 1993, Poland in 1998, Romania in 2006), public opinion
404 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(3)

polls have recorded a significant percentage of the population that is more favourable to
the communist past than was thought at the beginning of the 1990s. These percentages
vary, from 33% (in 2013) in the Czech Republic (B92, 2013) to between 40% (in 1997)
and 44% (in 2014) of the population in Poland (Kuczyńska-Zonik, 2018: 113), 54% (in
2010) and 44% (in 2014) in Romania (Besliu, 2014), and 60% (in 2009) in Bulgaria
(Mudeva, 2009).
In order to understand this apparent disjunction between the political level and socie-
ties’ reactions to systemic change, I argue that we must look at cultural memory practices
and, more specifically, at artistic practices documenting socialist art.
The ‘politics of memory’ (De Brito et al., 2001) lie at the intersection of TJ studies and
interdisciplinary memory studies. Several cultural practices or artistic practices, how-
ever, are not taken into account either by the traditional approaches of political science
or by memory studies. As Todorova (2014: 7) recalls, ‘because memory is polysemic by
nature, there will always be memories that resist the politics of memory produced by
authorities and institutions, which is reductive by definition’.
Furthermore, memory studies tend to use narrow case studies that help us to under-
stand a very specific example in detail, yet fail to verify how that example engages
with a transnational perspective. This article examines three case studies that cover
several countries in Eastern Europe, which can help to explain common phenomena at
work in those societies that underwent this political and societal transition 30 years
ago. I want to engage with a possible transnational art and politics of memory in
Eastern Europe, as mediated through three specific case studies: BACU, documentary
photography, and contemporary artists who use relicts of the past in their artworks. To
what extent can we speak of a European transnational memory as regards a shared
memory of communist relics?
Several theoretical approaches have been advanced thus far. The ‘concepts of transna-
tional memory (Huyssen [2000]), cosmopolitan memory (Levy and Sznaider [2002]),
multidirectional memory (Rothberg [2009]) and connective memory (Hirsch [2012])
emerged, theorizing memories in their travelling and connecting functions’ and under-
lined the need to ‘shift to a study of future-oriented memories, and the idea of “transre-
gional memory”’ (Wegner, 2016). These approaches refer mostly to transnational formats
of memory materialization in light of human rights philosophy and politics, while our
approach here takes a different, innovatory route.
Acknowledging the ‘transnational turn’ of memory studies, Assmann (2014) identi-
fied seven types of transnational memory, and this analysis will look at the transnational
memory of communist regimes in Europe and the cultural practices that support it.
Moreover, Erll’s concept of ‘travelling memory’ emphasizes how, ‘in the production of
cultural memory, people, media, mnemonic forms, contents, and practices are in con-
stant, unceasing motion’ (2011: 12). For Erll:

[transcultural memory] is based on the insight that memory fundamentally means movement:
traffic between individual and collective levels of remembering, circulation among social,
medial, and semantic dimensions. Such an approach means moving away from site-bound,
nation-bound, and in a naïve sense, cultures-bound research and displaying an interest in the
mnemonic dynamics unfolding across and beyond boundaries. (2011: 15)
Preda 405

For Rigney (2016), the conceptualization of ‘transnational memory refers to an ana-

lytic lens that investigates the movements and entanglements of collective memory
across and outside the borders of nation-states’, providing a conceptual framework with
which to study cultural memory and collective memory. De Cesari and Rigney (2014: 4)
stress how ‘transnationalism allows us to grasp the multi-scalarity of socio-cultural pro-
cesses and the fundamental mutual construction of the local, national and global’. This
‘allows memory to be visualized differently . . . as a dynamic operating at multiple,
interlocking scales and involving conduits, intersections, circuits, and articulations’, and
a ‘rethinking of scales and how they operate’ (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014: 5). They also
underline that different practices of remembrance can move beyond the discourses of
victimhood and, with the help of artists and others, provide spaces for ‘imagining things
otherwise’, and thus, ‘non-nostalgic modes of remembrance can indeed provide avenues
to democratic and emancipatory politics’ (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014: 21).
In this framework, I want to investigate how physical and mental sites of memory are
being resignified, repurposed and reimagined through the action of three cultural agents,
and what the effects are of this resignification of socialist monumental public works as
‘socialist modernism’. Socialist realist statues were removed from their places in the
early 1990s, and in some countries have been collected and exhibited as part of statue
parks, or ‘sculptural graveyards’ (Belcheva, 2017). Socialist realist buildings have also
been rediscovered and are being patrimonialized through documentary photography, as
are decorative artworks such as mosaics.
There is no definitive conclusion regarding the status of socialist monuments, although
there is extensive literature on their role in the transformation after 1990 (Forest and
Johnson, 2011; Lee, 2010; Levinson, 2018; Williams, 2008). Kuczyńska-Zonik’s analysis
of Soviet monuments in Central and Eastern Europe in terms of ‘dissonant heritage’ is
useful in thinking about the transnational artistic memory of communist relicts. She
defines the ‘dissonant heritage’ as having ‘no clear and coherent opinion’ that is a possible
‘cause for discord: it is simultaneously perceived as pleasant, resulting in satisfaction, or
as distorted, with an unpleasant and painful effect’ (2018: 103, 115). Kuczyńska-Zonik
asserts that gradually ‘the Soviet memorials have been recognized as a social historical
heritage and adapted to a new reality with a new appreciation of the monuments as a part
of art history’ (2018: 113). She also observes how ‘the depreciation of the icons of the
Soviet regime (in the form of paintings, statues and fragments of Lenin statues), changed
their meaning and made them into commercial goods’ (2018: 112).
Likewise, Bach’s analysis of the GDR takes into consideration ‘monumental socialist
public works that once sought to co-opt and coerce everyday life .  .  . as they are actively
unmarked – unbuilt, desecrated, demolished – and then remarked through their subse-
quent appropriation’, which leads to a struggle over the contested meaning of the past
(Bach, 2017: 8). In fact, as Czepczynski (2009: 17) argues, ‘the collapse of communism
left highly ideological landscapes and thousands of icons to be reinterpreted’ and reposi-
tioned. Furthermore, ‘one of the recent trends in Central European countries is a growing
recognition for modernist design from the 1960s and 1970s . .  . as the very best of “their
times” . . . functional, modern, avant-garde’ (Czepczynski, 2009: 27).
This socialist artistic patrimony has been collected and documented as an example of
socialist modernism by the artistic and architectural projects discussed in this analysis.
406 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(3)

The concept of socialist modernism was used to describe some of the art produced in the
former Yugoslavia, and has also been used in the last decade or so to discuss design
objects produced in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist countries
in the post-1956 period. Art historians of Central and Eastern European countries who
have analysed the differentiated impact of de-Stalinization in the artistic world have
similarly discussed the different forms of modernism seen after 1956.
The Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski noted that:

Pejić and Dunja Blaževic have observed that during the 1960s and 1970s Modernism rose to
the rank of the official art in Yugoslavia. A similar process took place in Poland, though perhaps
not to the same extent . . . [and] . . . Pejić characterized this local variant of Modernism as
Socialist Modernist form that played a similar role to the Socialist Realism of other Communist
countries. To a large extent, the official status of Socialist Modernism was so powerful because
it was ‘politically neutral’. (Piotrowski, 2009: 327)

According to Pejić (2003), ‘socialist aestheticism’ (Lukić), ‘communist modernism’

or ‘socialist modernism’ appeared in the early 1950s in Yugoslavia. In fact, as the author
states, socialist realism only lasted from 1945 to 1950 in Yugoslavia, and was followed
by the dominance of modernism at the official level, which coexisted with ‘new art
practices’.

An ‘autonomous’, ‘independent’, ‘cryptic and iconic’ art – Socialist Modernism – like any
modernistically-conscious style elsewhere, was not an art which disturbed the existing
social-political horizon. Simply put, apolitical High Modernism, made aware through Paris,
could ‘work’ not only in the ‘free world of the West’ but also in Serbia or SFRJ [Former
Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia], where it was accepted because it was a politically neutral
art. (Pejić, 2003)

So, socialist modernist artistic practices that were not politically committed appeared.
Denegri (2003) also introduced the concept of socialist modernism as something specific
to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ‘between East and West during the Cold
War . . . constituting a unique formation resulting from the crossbreeding of the proper-
ties of the Eastern and Western art model’ (Denegri, 2003: 173, quoted in Janković-
Beguš, 2017: 149). For Šuvaković (2008), socialist realism in Yugoslavia transformed
into ‘moderated modernist art’, which he calls ‘socialist aestheticism’.

This process led to a new type of artistic work, different from ‘socialist realism’, but also
different from the ‘high’ modernism of the interwar period. This ‘socialist modernism’ can be
summed up as the ‘discovery and development of the autonomy of art in the society conditioned
by the centralized government and its cultural policy’ (Šuvaković, 2017, quoted in Janković-
Beguš, 2017: 150)

Referring to the Soviet case, Reid notes that:

‘socialist’ and ‘modernist’ were positioned as incompatible. Although the conjunction of

political and artistic radicalism in Soviet Russia of the 1920s is well known, the renascence
Preda 407

there in mid-century of socialist modernism was unthinkable in Cold War terms and has only
recently begun to be taken seriously. (Reid, 2009: 465)

Crowley observes how different the promotion of a modernist aesthetic of design was in
the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev era, and how:

in Poland, whilst the aesthetics of modernization in the home were similar, the ideological shift
that they represented was somewhat different. Unlike the Soviet Union where a specialist
design press aligned the contemporary style with neo-productivist discourse, in Poland the
aesthetic was promoted without reference to any socialist principles. (Crowley, 2002: 195)

For the analysis of the GDR case, Pence and Betts (2008) employed the term ‘socialist
modern’ as a form of ‘alternative modernity’ (Pence and Betts, 2008: 11, 12). Their
attempt was to move beyond ‘the conceptual divide between politics at the state level and
the culture of everyday life in order to bring into better perspective the specific contours
of the GDR’s “socialist modernity”’ (Pence and Betts, 2008: 6).
Thus, a transnational cultural memory approach is useful in discussing the ways in
which socialist relics are being resignified by artistic projects, bearing in mind what De
Cesari and Rigney stress about the ‘multi-scalarity of socio-cultural processes’ and the
role of art in ‘imagining things otherwise’ (2014: 4, 21). In accordance with Kuczyńska-
Zonik’s observation on ‘dissonant heritage’ and Bach’s reflection on the contested strug-
gle over the meaning of the past, the projects analysed here all share the need to separate
from their original contexts the formal characteristics of those artworks being collected
or resignified. The concept of socialist modernism was used to define the art created in
Yugoslavia after the break with Moscow as a form of neutral, autonomous art. The case
of the Soviet Union has been used by Reid to discuss the design produced there, and by
Crowley to analyse the Polish case, whereas for Pence and Betts it defined an ‘alternative
modernity’ to the Western concept. Within this framework, the case studies analysed in
what follows, especially those in the first and second sections, can be placed in the con-
tinuation of this approach to socialist heritage as socialist modernism, choosing to stress
the aesthetic, artistic aspects of un-ideologized socialist relics. This article does not con-
sider these public buildings and monuments as expressions of socialist modernism,
which was, as previously mentioned, a term used for specific countries and styles during
the communist regimes in South and Central and Eastern Europe. It acknowledges in the
discussion that follows that a series of projects have adopted a strategy of documenting
this built socialist patrimony that labels these relicts as representing a form of socialist
modernism and emphasizes their formal, aesthetic characteristics.

The formal valorization of socialist architecture as socialist

modernism
The first case under examination is that of the Socialist Heritage initiative (2014), which
is a platform launched by the Romanian-based BACU as part of the International Council
for Monuments and Sites initiatives (ICOMOS – ISC20C). As part of this endeavour, the
Socialist Modernism platform includes documentation, monitoring, research, and
408 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(3)

protection of socialist modernist architecture created between 1955 and 1989/1991 in the
former Eastern bloc, including monuments (Socialist Modernism webpage, n.d.). After
an initial research phase, BACU’s plan is to create regulations and education programmes
through a ‘legislative program concerning the architectural stylistics of the buildings/
districts erected in [the] socialist era’ (Socialist Modernism webpage, n.d.).
From the online documentation, accessible on the project’s website, it is unclear what
definition of the former Eastern bloc the project uses, and what the criteria are for choosing
one country from the region over another. Under the Research and Archive categories of the
web platform, there are eight countries (Bulgaria, the former East Germany, Georgia,
Romania, the Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine), while the map pro-
duced on the website includes 34 places, including countries – some of them twice – and a
city in Romania (Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the city
of Brasov in Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia,
Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Mongolia,
Montenegro, Poland, the Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russia and the Russian Federation,
Serbia, the Slovak Republic and Slovakia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan). This list
includes ex-communist countries in South, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as some of
the ex-Soviet states, but also includes Cuba, which remains a communist country today.
Moreover, the list accessible on the website includes an unequal number of docu-
mented sites. For example, Albania has 10 acknowledged sites, while the Republic of
Moldova has 40 entries. From the 13 categories (housing, education, medicine, culture,
administrative, research, transport, hotels and restaurants, trade, services and industry,
leisure and sports, parks and public spaces, special buildings), that of Memorials-
monumental art includes only nine entries in Germany, Romania, Armenia, Montenegro,
Albania, and the Russian Federation.
In 2018 BACU also launched an architectural guide, Socialist Modernist Architecture:
Romania and the Republic of Moldova, that includes the mapping of 248 buildings (Rusu,
2018). The buildings from the two countries are grouped together according to eight catego-
ries: Education, cult, culture and sport institutions (64 buildings, of which 13 are in Moldova),
Residential buildings (38 buildings, of which 13 are in Moldova), Commercial and service
facilities (28 buildings, of which 5 are in Moldova), Administrative buildings and exhibition
centers (22 buildings, of which 10 are in Moldova), Transportation buildings (22 buildings,
of which 9 are in Moldova), Hotels and leisure activities (34 buildings, of which 3 are in
Moldova), Medical centers (16 buildings, of which 5 are in Moldova), Utilitarian buildings
and industrial facilities (22 buildings, of which 5 are in Moldova). There is a mapping and
short presentation for each of the 248 buildings (63 in Moldova) that homogenizes the built
patrimony of four decades in the two countries, which were part of different, although simi-
lar, political systems: the Popular Republic of Romania, or the Socialist Republic of
Romania, and the Soviet Union, of which Moldova was a part until 1991.
The guide defines socialist modernism as ‘an approach to architecture that was typical
to the former socialist countries between 1955 and 1991 and was insufficiently covered
by architectural history’ (Rusu, 2018: 11). The stated intention of this project was to:

draw attention to this heritage, which we consider to be valuable and meaningful for architectural
history, in relation to the social and political context. Our goal is to put new life into this
Preda 409

heritage, not for symbolic reasons, but because we believe that the modernist elements managed
to overcome some of the ideological requirements of the time and gave the urban space a
certain savour, so illustrative for that epoch. (Rusu, 2018: 11)

The guide continues by arguing for the disentanglement of the built patrimony from the
totalitarian paradigm:

Unfortunately this type of architecture is associated with totalitarianism. This is exactly what
we are trying to clarify: we would like to prove that the architecture of the time is valuable and
to analyse the significance of that particular slice of history in the wider global context, without
any partisanship for a certain political system. (Rusu, 2018: 11)

This observation aligns with Kuczyńska-Zonik’s view, according to which architecture

has been separated from the dissonant heritage approach to socialist realism:

While Central and Eastern European societies interpret socialist realism as a dissonant heritage,
the architecture of socialist realism is no longer part of the rejected heritage. Over the past
decade, growing interest and appreciation of its legacy have led to giving statutory protection
to the most outstanding examples. (Kuczyńska-Zonik, 2018: 114)

Furthermore, as one of the authors included in the guide acknowledges, ‘valuable crea-
tions were no longer the product of professional debates or the results of a critical appa-
ratus, but rather of individual experience and ambition to stand out from the common
thinking’ (Mitrea, 2018: 27). According to this view, socialist modernist buildings that
are appreciated today were created by the efforts of certain individuals, and not as the
result of the state’s efforts at the time.
Initiatives such as BACU’s demonstrate that while it is important to document the
built patrimony of the socialist regimes, this classification should take into account the
context in which these buildings were erected, their meaning at the time of inauguration,
their transformed connotations through time, and their value as formal objects that testify
to a specific period imbued with a certain ideology. The online platform creates a broad
transnational overview of the monumental socialist public works in Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union, which homogenizes this built patrimony and grants it an a pos-
teriori classification as ‘socialist modernist’. In this case, the transnational character is
seen in the circulation of the socialist aesthetic in the Eastern bloc, which is now immor-
talized by architects and photographers.

Documenting the relics of the past: homogenization of the

socialist monumental public works
There are several documentary photography projects that portray the buildings, monuments,
statues, mosaics, and decorative plaques created during the socialist regimes in Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union. Their stated purpose is one of documentation, of reg-
istering these material proofs before they disappear, or as a contribution to their inclusion in
the heritage recognized by the state. This section argues that they too contribute to an ongo-
ing transnational memorialization of the socialist heritage as un-ideologized.
410 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(3)

The album Socialist Modernism: Archaeology of an Era by Roman Bezjak (2011),

edited by Inka Schube, is the result of the documentation of residential buildings, hotels
and palaces of culture from Talinn and Tirana to Dresden and Dnipropetrovsk across five
years. Bezjak, originally from Slovenia, produced large portraits of socialist buildings in
several cities in Eastern Europe, and according to his editor’s presentation, he ‘takes an
impartial view of communist architecture’ as ‘his series render a kind of archaeology of
postwar modernism without nostalgically glorifying the former East Bloc, for he makes
visible the exploitation of utopia and its entry into everyday life’ (Bezjak, 2011).
A second example of a transnational project is Protect Public Space (begun in 2017),
which has taken over the Bucharest branch of the Czech Institute’s Instagram page
(Protect Public Space, n.d.). Curated by Jakub Charousek and Frantisek Zachoval from
the Czech Institute in Bucharest, the project documents the public monuments in
Romania and is inspired by a similar initiative in the Czech Republic (Plastic Art in
Public Areas, n.d.: Normalization webpage). Instagram is an online platform that uses
only images with a short caption, and thus the project includes images of buildings,
monuments and mosaics created during the socialist regime with a short description,
which sometimes includes the year of creation. According to Zachoval:

We monitor, photograph and research not only monuments, but also the space between private
properties – the actual public space, decorated with mosaics, welcome signs, art works and
details on buildings of very high aesthetic quality – as it was built between the 1950s and the
1980s. (in Bogdan, 2019)

Charousek refers to the buildings as part of the shared Brutalist heritage and believes that
the project’s idea was to look at ‘these remnants of our past without an ideological lens,
but rather with historical curiosity’ (Romania Insider, 2019). For Charousek, who was
born after 1989, there is a difference between the way their project has been received by
the younger generation, which does not have a direct experience of socialism, and the
older generation, who do not want to see this kind of past. He states that ‘the distance
they have is what helps them’ to see this built patrimony in a different light (Meseșan,
2018). The two Czechs map socialist art with the intention of researching and document-
ing this legacy, and ‘first of all to raise awareness about it’ (Bogdan, 2019). As well as
collaborating on the Protect Public Space project, Roberta Curcă is also involved in her
own undertaking, Border Marks Archive (2018), which also has an Instagram account
under that name. Curcă takes photographs of the sculptures or monuments created to
mark the border between the Romanian counties, cities and villages (Figure 1).
These two examples of transnational projects documenting the socialist heritage bring
together examples of public buildings and public monuments as similar and homogene-
ous, although they were found in dissimilar countries in the former communist East. I
argue that although this approach of the ‘dissonant heritage’, which tends to homogenize
and underline the uniformization of the socialist past, is useful for the otherwise-absent
documentation of the material remains of the past, it can be counter-productive in the
attempt to understand the context of each national case.
Apart from the transnational approach, there are several national projects in Germany,
Ukraine, and the former Yugoslavia that testify to the same willingness to document
Preda 411

Figure 1.  Roberta Curcă, The Women Who Built Socialist Romania, mosaic in Găiești, Romania
Source: Photograph by Roberta Curcă.

socialist monuments and other socialist public works without reference to the ideologi-
cal context in which they were produced.
The German photographer Martin Maleschka has documented endangered GDR art,
which led to publication of the book GDR Construction-related Art: Art in Public Spaces
1950–1990 (Maleschka, 2018) featuring 120 well-conserved artworks. Although
Maleschka recognizes that ‘the art in the GDR had an educational mission’ and the
themes of the public murals are ‘often ideologically and politically determined and in
many cases the same: the state, the happy family, the structure – often depicted with a
large crane and a slab hanging from it – the tree of life – for growth – or the dove of
peace’ he affirms that ‘ideology is not relevant to me. This is related to my age. When the
wall came down, I was seven. I’m really carefree, especially in terms of art – no matter
what era it comes from’ (Rellensmann, 2016). The authors of these documentary projects
often invoke their age as a reason for having a more detached, ‘de-ideologized’ perspec-
tive on the socialist past, although their approach is of course influenced by their con-
texts, whether they acknowledge it or not.
Yevgen Nikiforov (2017) is a Ukrainian photographer whose project recently resulted
in a book, Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics (Figure 2). As the description of
the volume underlines, the photographer documented more than a thousand mosaics and
public works from the period 1950 to 1980 in the context of ‘Soviet modernism’
(Nikiforov, 2017). The book includes 200 mosaics from the thousand or more he identi-
fied in 109 cities and villages throughout Ukraine; the mosaics are quite varied in their
412 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(3)

Figure 2.  House of Culture, Shevchenkove village, Odesa oblast. Stepan Kyrychenko, Roman
Kyrychenko, 1978, coloured smalto
Source: Photograph by Yevgen Nikiforov.

topics, style and techniques (Voon, 2017). The project, which lasted more than three
years, became urgent for Nikiforov after Ukraine adopted a law in 2015 ‘that prohibited
Soviet symbols in public space and sanctioned their removal’ (Mallonee, 2017). The
photographer considers the mosaics to be ‘artistically valuable’ and:

points to mosaicists like Valeriy Lamakh and Alexander Dubovik, who incorporated subversive,
abstract elements from their private painting into public projects. ‘The strongest monumentalist
artists did not merely illustrate what the party told them in these mosaics,’ [but] they
communicate basic ideas that outgrow the propaganda, and that’s why they are still interesting.
(in Mallonee, 2017)

At the same time, as the editors Olga Balashova and Lizaveta German note in the book’s
foreword, ‘Soviet monumental art failed to engage or enchant the public, both in the
Soviet times and after Ukraine gained independence, [and] it was treated as state-com-
missioned propaganda, not worthy of attention’ (Voon, 2017). Nikiforov ‘was told, time
and time again, that this heritage does not belong on the wall, that this is no art’ (Voon,
2017). ‘Framing them as artworks,’ Nikiforov argues, ‘I believe that we’d do well to
keep even those [overtly communist ones], granted that we provided them with annota-
tions explaining the historical context. We shouldn’t cultivate ignorance and pretend that
the Soviet period never existed’ (Voon, 2017).
In the former Yugoslavia, there is also documentation of spomeniks (the Serb/Croatian/
Slovenian word for monument). The first example is the Spomenik photo series (2006–9)
Preda 413

produced by Jan Kempenaers and the second is the Spomenik Monument Database
(2018) by Niebyl et al. Spomeniks are ‘abstract anti-fascist WWII [Second World War]
monument buildings’ constructed between 1960 and 1990 (Niebyl et al., 2018). Although
the description of Niebyl’s database mentions that there were hundreds or perhaps thou-
sands of such monuments, the site only includes 100. Their significance is different, as
on the one hand there is a willingness to forget about them, and on the other there is an
inclination to celebrate them as anti-fascist monuments (Niebyl et al., 2018).

For Tihana Pupovac, a major problem is also the depoliticised framing of the monuments. Left
without any indication of what they commemorate, or even of who designed them, the results
are ‘deliberately oblivious’ to the anti-fascist struggle that they commemorate, or to why the
artists and communities thought they were appropriate – which, once, they evidently did.
(Hatherley, 2016)

What all these documentary projects emphasize is the artistic value of the socialist
monumental public works documented, collected, and presented, with no interest in the
ideological context in which they were created. Their authors underline the need to col-
lect evidence of this socialist heritage to raise awareness about its existence, and to make
sure it is protected. At the same time, they promote an understanding of art produced in
an over-determined ideological context as autonomous art.
I contend that by not providing a thorough understanding of the contexts and condi-
tions, or including data about the different artists who produced the range of public build-
ings, monuments and mosaics, these projects contribute to a homogenized,
decontextualized memorialization of socialist monumentalism. What emerges is a puzzle
of similar images that have been decontextualized and treated as mere aesthetic objects.
The media types used in these projects are also relevant to the process of memorializing
the socialist past. The use of documentary photography gives a sense of realness to the
endeavour that brings the process of taking inventory closer to that of research. The use of
digital platforms such as Facebook and Instagram allows for a certain degree of interaction
with the public, who can comment or give more information concerning the images. For
example, on Instagram, images presented by the Protect Public Space project are provided
with limited information; only the place (city), and sometimes the year, of the mosaic,
monument, or design are mentioned, allowing for a partial recontextualization.
The ‘mnemonic dynamics’ (Erll, 2011) of recollecting these signs of the past leads us
to argue for a transnational memory of socialist public works in the former European
communist countries, which emerges from the work of these cultural agents who are also
acting as ‘memory entrepreneurs’ (Jelin, 2003).

Resignifying the socialist past: artistic recollections and

forgetting the ‘dead weight’ of the past
It is not only architectural history that is being rewritten to include socialist monuments, and
documentary photography uses the relicts of the past to discuss a new, more comprehensive
understanding of recent history. Contemporary artists in Eastern Europe also engage in a
re-evaluation of socialist relics, which are being resignified. In this section I discuss the
414 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(3)

artworks created by four artists in Bulgaria (Nikola Mihov), Lithuania (Deimantas

Narkevicius), Romania (Ciprian Mureșan), and the Czech Republic (David Černý).
Nikola Mihov’s project Forget Your Past (2009–12) documented more than a hundred
socialist monuments that are still in place in Bulgaria (see Mihov, 2009–12). The title of
the artist’s project is taken from the graffiti written at the entrance of the Bulgarian
Communist Party Memorial at Mount Buzludja. Mihov’s project stems from the obser-
vation that these communist monuments were ‘looted and neglected’ and remain ‘silent
symbols of the forgotten past’ (Mihov, 2009–12). As the artist testifies, his research
included discussions with people, including architects, looking at archives and taking
photographs (Mihov,2009–12). It is interesting how, in his documentary photography of
the monuments that are still standing, Mihov is able to record the layered memory of the
monuments and their current resignification. For example, on the statue of a man – part
of the Monument to the Resistance in Vidin – somebody has drawn a Hitler-like mus-
tache and a swastika on the character’s chest. The same kind of intervention, in the form
of graffiti, was also present on the now-demolished 1300 Years of Bulgaria monument in
downtown Sofia. Mihov’s photographs are all black and white, frontal portrayals of the
abandoned monuments and the artist shows them as they remain today. He testifies to the
importance of not forgetting, contrary to the title of his project:

I do not believe that we should forget the past, and that is why I did this project.. . . However,
I feel awkward when journalists ask me if I feel nostalgia. You cannot feel nostalgic about
something you did not really experience. The new generation is not nostalgic. The problem is
that there is not enough information. (in Van Versendaal, 2015)

Together with Martin Angelov and Valeri Gurov, Mihov is also one of the creators of
Socmus, an online virtual museum of socialist-era graphic design in Bulgaria that pre-
sents examples from different fields from the period 1944 to 1989. The intention behind
the creation of this archive is ‘fully focused on the artistic value of the works and not on
their historic or political context’ (Socmus, n.d.). Again there is an expressed intention to
document the past as an un-ideologized version of that experience, which brings us back
to De Cesari and Rigney’s (2014: 4) consideration of the importance of a transnational
perspective that allows for the ‘rethinking of scales and how they operate’.
The end of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe was accompanied by the removal
of the Lenin statues as well as the destruction of other communist symbols. Nevertheless,
as Wolfgang Becker’s film Goodbye, Lenin! (2003) highlighted, the statues of Lenin con-
tinued to linger in public spaces afterwards. In his work Once in the XX Century (2004), the
Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius used local television footage of the removal of the
Lenin statue in Vilnius in 1991. The original video is reversed by Narkevicius, who thus
shows us the crowd gathering, excited to applaud the installation of the statue on its pedes-
tal instead of its removal. Narkevicius claimed: ‘Everyone seemed to think that removing
these objects would lead to immediate changes in society. In truth, however, the people had
simply disposed of silent witnesses to history’ (Jovaraite, 2014–15: 51). In a later work
titled 20 July 2015 (2016), Narkevicius recorded the disappearance of a Socialist Realist
composition, consisting of eight figures, from the Green Bridge in the center of Vilnius on
20 July 2015. Although monuments or memorials associated with the Soviet past were
removed in the early 1990s, the Socialist Realist figures remained in place until 2015, not
Preda 415

Figure 3.  Ciprian Mureșan, Dead Weights (2012)

being considered overtly political. In 2015, during the electoral campaign for the mayor of
Vilnius, the candidate who was subsequently elected promised to remove them, as they
were symbols of Soviet interference. For Narkevicius, it was interesting because ‘he
thought these discussions were over in the 1990s, in the aftermath of independence, and
that the socialist realist sculptures were “beautiful objects”, but “political monsters”’
(Glover, 2017). In Narkevicius’ case, both video artworks question the status of the
socialist relics and of their removal from the public space at the end of the communist
regime. In this sense, Narkevicius’ gesture can be thought of in relation to Mihov’s endeav-
our, which sought to document the monuments that remain as still-standing evidence.
The Romanian artist Ciprian Mureșan produced an artwork titled Communism Never
Happened (2006), which featured the titular phrase in letters made from vinyl records of
propaganda songs produced during the communist regime in Romania. The artwork
denies communism existed, while its materiality points to the contrary. In a subsequent
artwork, Dead Weights (2012; see Figure 3), Mureșan used bronze copies of socialist
sculptures that belonged to the Art Museum in Cluj, which he found in the basement of
the museum. The artwork is composed of several sculptures (some small, others bigger)
placed directly on the ground without a plinth or pedestal. We can see a peasant standing,
a woman worker of smaller dimensions, a small bust of a young man, the head of a
woman, and abstract sculptures. His artwork:

reflects on the strategies of undermining the ideological discourse of an artwork. By copying an

art object, that object grows weak and vulnerable, turning against and dismantling its original
416 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(3)

spirit.. . . The artist’s undertaking unfolds in a story about authority, the accepted canon,
history, and mimetic strategies for subverting them all. (Artmap, 2015–16)

Moreover, the artist used the sculptures as weights for his etchings, which included
‘illustrations of Ilf and Petrov’s story “The Invisible Employee”’ (Mousse Magazine,
2016). In this story,

a small community in Soviet Russia decides to build a big statue for Timiriazev, who was
thought by the town committee to be a revolutionary hero. A spectacular equestrian statue is
commissioned, but shortly after the monument is completed, it is established that Timiriazev
was actually a botanist and a science man. As a result the sculptor replaced the sword in his
hand with a beet and his helmet with a cap from Oxford University. Finally, the sculpture was
a droll combination between the heroic posture and the civilian profession of Timiriazev.
Following the same irony directed towards monumentality and artworks, the artist renders
visible the sculptures and hides his own works. (Mousse Magazine, 2016)

Finally, in his artwork Pink Tank (1991), the Czech artist David Černý proposed
another way of resignifying socialist relics. In this intervention, Černý painted the
Monument to Soviet Tank Crews bright pink. It had been unveiled in 1945 in Prague’s
Kinsky Square, standing on a 5-metre pedestal, and remained in place after the regime
change of 1989. His gesture was seen as a way of changing the narrative concerning the
end of the communist regime, and of resignifying this material presence of the Soviet
occupation by making it more visible. Černý’s gesture of resignification connotes how
the end of the regime, and the fact that the Soviet army had left the country, did not
mean their symbolic presence had ended. The tank was thereafter repainted in green and
pink several times and was later removed, although there were voices within Czech
society that requested its return.
The artists discussed in this section proposed four different ways of resignifying
socialist relics. They documented monuments through photography, interviews, and the
exploration of archives; they questioned their status through video practices; they copied
the monuments and used them as hiding places; and finally they resignified the objects
by painting over them and making them even more visible.
In these artistic interventions, the politicization of the monuments is more obvious
than in the instances previously discussed. The artistic gestures differ in their approaches.
Mureșan uses copies of the socialist monuments, questioning their authority; he decon-
textualizes the socialist sculptures and presents them as part of a lost socialist still life
made of scattered, unpaired objects. Narkevicius’ returning Lenin to his pedestal can be
seen as engaging with the discussion on the growing nostalgia for the communist past,
but it could equally be viewed as a visual artifice to examine the significance and rele-
vance, 30 years later, of removing the ‘men made of bronze’ to signal the change of
regime. Černý’s irreverent gesture is a way of highlighting the socialist relicts and asking
for the removal of the material signs of the Soviet presence. Conversely, Mihov’s docu-
mentation of the socialist monuments in Bulgaria is different from those presented in the
previous two sections because it looks beyond the mere presence of the relicts and con-
textualizes them, especially with regard to their larger memorial context.
Preda 417

These four different ways of resituating socialist monumental public works, instead of
just immortalizing them as in the projects discussed before, help us to interrogate their
meanings, their legacy in the present, and how artistic strategies for displaying and pre-
serving these artworks could be thought of in a transnational artistic memorialization
strategy. By questioning the monuments’ role and status, contemporary artists in the
region help bring forward a shared strategy, which is seen co-emerging without any trace
of transnational circulation of their ideas.

Conclusions
This article has analysed the different ways in which artistic projects in architectural
history, documentary photography, and contemporary art engage with socialist relics to
propose an un-ideologized, transnational artistic memorialization of the socialist past.
Artists, art historians and other cultural agents in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
space want to render socialist monuments visible to raise awareness and in order to col-
lect documentation of their existence. Through the process of documentation, this leg-
acy is resignified.
The theoretical approach proposed is that of a transnational cultural memory of the
dissonant socialist heritage, analysed as a form of socialist modernism. This term was
employed to study art produced in the former Yugoslavia, and in the design of objects in
countries like the Soviet Union (Reid), Poland (Crowley) and the GDR (Pence and
Betts). Asking if there is a European transnational memory of communist relics, I argued
that these practices of documentation in architectural history have the effect of homog-
enizing the representation of socialist monuments – their depoliticization – and that by
focusing only on formal details they are transformed into timeless proofs of a un-ideolo-
gized heritage. Several of the agents involved in the transnational memorialization prac-
tices evoke the need to collect material evidence by emphasizing the aesthetic
characteristics, without taking into account the ideological or political context.
Through contemporary art projects, there is also a transnational interest in resignify-
ing these socialist relics. If the Bulgarian artist Nikola Mihov argues for the need to
document the past, the Lithuanian artist Narkevicius questions our relationship to the
past by returning Lenin to his lost pedestal. The Romanian artist Ciprian Mureșan copied
relics of the past, thus questioning their authority, and hid his drawings of an eloquent
story beneath them. Finally, Černý resignified a socialist relic by painting it bright pink.
These gestures by Mureşan and Černý, although different in method and purpose, can be
seen as ways of politicizing anew the decommunized monuments and engaging with
their transformed significance after the regime change of 1989. By re-mediating the
socialist monuments through photographs (Mihov) and repainting (Černý), they are
given agency to act as counter-monuments, no longer celebrating the socialist regimes,
but acting as proofs of the socialist experiences.
Going back to the initial question: ‘To what extent can we speak of a European trans-
national memory as regards a shared memory of communist relics?’, in this article I
analysed three types of examples that use the material relicts of socialism differently. The
‘mnemonic dynamics’ (Erll, 2011) of this ‘dissonant heritage’ (Kuczyńska-Zonik, 2018)
indeed construct a transnational memory of the socialist public works, but if artists tend
418 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(3)

to problematize the role of these monuments and further contextualize them, the archi-
tectural approach and the documentary photography approach align in their need to doc-
ument and safeguard this built patrimony. Their tactics, however, create a uniformized
picture of this diverse patrimonial landscape.

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: This work was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Research and
Innovation, CNCS – UEFISCDI, Romania, project number PN-III-P1-1.1 – TE 2016 – 0346,
within PNCDI III.

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Author biography
Caterina Preda, PhD is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science/Faculty of
Political Science (FSP), University of Bucharest. She is a comparativist interested in art and poli-
tics (both cultural policies and visual artifacts) during dictatorships and post-dictatorships in South
America and Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania and Chile.