Impious behavior at memorial sites is not infrequent. The Holocaust memorial in Berlin had hardly been open a month when reports of children playing and lovers kissing among the pylons made the news. A report from this week's Baltic Times takes the cake, however: Apparently, more and more British nationals (presumably drunken male tourists) are getting caught peeing on the Freedom Monument in downtown Riga. For the first time the regional court handed down jail time to a British citizen: five days of administrative arrest. The problem has drawn comment from local politicians all the way up to the interior minister.

In the most recent case, the defendent claimed that he was not peeing, but just happened to be running around the statue when his pants fell down. His obviousely false testimony contributed to the decision to not give him the usual fine of 50 lats (about 70 Euros).

For my part, I am having difficulty understanding why anyone would relieve themselves directly on the monument unless they are blind drunk or actually intend to desecrate it. It is flanked on two sides by parks which offer much better opportunities. In addition, all the downtown bars and outdoor restaurants and cafes have facilities, some of them less than two blocks from the site.

According to the Baltic Times (Adam Krowka: "Playing with granite fire", Baltic Times, 20 February, 2008), the municipal authorities in Narva, a largely Russian city in eastern Estonia, on the border to the Russian Federation, removed a Soviet-era memorial on the morning of the 18th.

The memorial was a bas relief statue along a wall in the down town, old city area, dedicated to the "Communards," a reference to the brief period of communist control of the city during the immediate post-World War One period. It was built for the 50th anniversary in 1968. Judging by the photos, it would appear to be a typical and rather ugly example of Soviet 1960s monumental art.

The move is arguably far less controversial than the removal of the Red Army soldier in Tallinn. The site of the communards' memorial is not a buriel site and does not reflect history within living memory.

Still, the article mentions several issues that indicate that the removal is more than just getting rid of some old, granite blocks: several contruction companies denied the contract to remove the monument, seeking to avoid involvement in controversy. Futhermore, the initiative was taken by a journalist and history teacher, Tanel Nazur, who approached the city council with a list of 600 signatures of people who favor the removal. Since Narva's population is 68,000, critics immediately attacked the petition for representing fewer than 1% of the population. “So this means if 600 signatures are collected in Tallinn to remove the Freedom Monument, then they will remove it?” wrote one letter to the editor in a local paper. So far, however, the worst seems to be some bewildered and frustrated conversation on the Russian-language forum pages of Estonian papers, not riots and diplomatic crisis as was the case last year in Tallinn.

The move followed several earlier initiatives to have the monument moved to other locations, but which were refused by some city council members, for example inclusion in an outdoor park along with other Soviet-era monumental art.

Overall, the two crises show the importance of the Great Patriotic War in Russian memory, both in Russia proper and in areas of the former Soviet Union that are still home to significant Russian populations. Statues dedicated to the Red Army, the burial sites of fallen Soviet soldiers - those are holy ground. They transcend ideology. The events of 1918-1919 represent a much lower level of personal involvement and commitment. (A similar memorial in Tallinn is this one. It will be interesting to see if it is removed soon.)

The situation in Riga tells a similar story. There are still numerous memorials to the Red Army in the city, both in cemeteries and in public space. The monmument to the liberators of Riga is especially bombastic and was even the target of a bombing in 1999. But they remain standing. Those memorials which are purely "communist" in nature - busts or statues of Soviet Russians like Kirov and Lenin or even a large bronze statue of the Latvian communist leader Peteris Stucka - were all removed very quickly following the collapse of the communist regime. The local Russians did not rise up in rage to prevent this. They still gether at the "liberators" monument on important anniversaries and would no-doubt raise a lot of hell if it were removed. In any case it is not a situation where the Russians identify with and defend all elements of their Soviet past, although sometimes an ideological symbol can have national meanings.