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.

The Soviet memorial near down town Tallinn has been controversial for years. It was blocked from visitors do to unrest last year when I visited the site (see my photos here).

On the evening of the 28th of April several hundred Russian youth tried to storm the site, where the statue was being removed and the bodies of the Soviet soldiers buried beneath it exhumed. 200 people were arrested and one young man stabbed to death. The statue has since been re-erected at another cemetery at the edge of town. There have been demonstrations by the Russian youth group "Nashi" ("Ours") and Russian veterans in front of the Estonian embassy in Moscow. Partipants carried banners calling Estonia a "fascist" state, echoing the rhetoric of the Soviet period when the authoritarian regimes of the interwar Baltic were grouped together with Hitler's Germany. Russia has threatened Estonia with an economic boycott. Even local politicians, like the mayor of Moscow Yurii Luzhkov, have called on people to stop buying Estonian products. Even the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has spoken out against the removal of the statue.

According to reports in the German press, the issue is being driven in part by Estonian internal politics as well. The Centrist party under former government head Edgar Savisaar is apparently thought to have "dubious connnections" to Moscow and would be damaged by a trade war with Russia.

Today's anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War is likely to bring a renewal of the recent strife. At the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in 2005, Estonia refused to send a delegation to the ceremonies in Moscow. The Latvian president only attended to offer the Russians face-to-face a clear alternative interpretation of that year.

I don't usually like to recommend policy, but it seems to me that this would have been an opportunity for a counter-memorial. A railroad cattle car parked across the street, for example, would have left the gravesite untouched, but would have been a reminder of the mass deportations of Estonians after their "liberation." Such a project would probably only enflame the situation and lead to more violence, however.

In any case it is not the site as such that is contested in this particular case. The site is significant because it was occupied by the Soviet memorial. It bears no particular significance pre-dating the memorial. As such, it is perhaps reminiscent of of the Russian Orthodox cathedrals which were built in the 19th century in the city centers of Riga, Warsaw, Tallinn and other cities to "mark" Russian occupation. The Poles demolished their Russian Orthodox cathedral after regaining independence. The Soviet Union did not object to the destruction of churches. But the post-Soviet Russian state identifies much more strongly with the symbolic content of its "markers" in what are now foreign capitals.

Update: Ironically, there is a scandal afoot in Russia itself in the Moscow suburb of Khimki. To make way for a new shopping center, several World War Two-era graves were hastily removed, provoking some protest. It would appear that there is a level of real sentiment at one level, but that the issue is a matter of pure political manipulation and populism among Russia's political elites.

Links:
Spiegel.de: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,479809,00.html
The Wikipedia article is quite thorough:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Soldier_of_Tallinn

There are now 16 memorial sites from the Estonian capital online at sites-of-memory.de. The pictures were all taken on the same day in June of last year.

An interesting aspect of the whole collection of them taken together is the way in which the memorial landscape only partially reflects the change in the political landscape. The Lenin statues are gone. Following the memorial symbols on my tourist map, I found a few flower beds where once memorials stood. Passers-by were unable to tell me what used to be there. Other Soviet memorials survive: The Red Army memorial has been modified, but remains well maintained if very controversial. The lawn at the Maarjamae memorial complex is kept by the state, but the memorial itself is falling into complete disrepair. The memorial to trade union delegates killed by the "bourgeoisie" in 1919 is both well maintained and completely ignored. The Germans have re-established their presence by re-building the memorial to the Baltenregiment and keeping up a nice, newly rennovated military cemetery. There are several memorials to writers which survive from Soviet times as well as some new and newly-erected monuments to Estonian independence including the memorial to the fallen from the Landwehr and Russian wars of 1918-1920, pictured here. The most popular will probably be the memorial to the sunken ferry Estonia.

Tallinn itself gave me the impression of a tourist destination which was totally feeding off of its medieval German past. The young women selling postcards were dressed as medieval market women, there were men pulling ancient carts through the streets, countless shops selling folkloric handicrafts, there was a lot of use of the German-style ("gothic") writing in advertizing, and the whole medieval downtown had been renovated. This is presumably an identity that is visually exploitable and attractive without at the same time transporting any danger of political revisionism. The real German minority is long gone and essentially harmless while Russo-Soviet legacy remains both demographically real (albeit not so much as in Riga or Narva) and geopolitically threatening.

There are about 15 more Estonia memorials from the city of Tartu which have not gone online yet.

UPDATE: I would like to thank Andres Kasekamp for contributing background information on several of the memorials from Tallinn.