And the Statues Come Alive Again European Mnemonic Wars in EU Bulgaria and Brexit Britain
The first version of this piece was prepared in late 2023 and was accepted for publication by a Ukrainian journal shortly thereafter. But understandable delays in publication have led me to share it on my own website with some recent revisions and edits. Many thanks to Neža Čebron Lipovec (Slovenia) and Olexandr Butsenko and Ivetta Delikatnay (Ukraine), Boris Angelov and Gina Kafedzhian (Bulgaria) for their useful comments and feedback during the preparation of this piece.
November 2023
Еxcerpt:
Edward Said once wrote that,
Facts do not speak at all for themselves but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them. Such a narrative has to have a beginning and an end: in the Palestinian case, a homeland for the resolution of its exile in 1948. But as Hayden White has noted in a seminal article, “narrative in general, from the folk tale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized ‘history’, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.
The 24th February 2022 Russian full-frontal attack on Kyiv marked an attempted invasion of Ukraine. It’s now heading towards its second winter. Ukraine insisted that the war had started in 2014 with the invasion of Crimea by Russian proxy forces. Since February 2022 tens of thousands of people have died. Russian war crimes and others defined as genocide are consistently reported and international recognition of such have been mounting. More than 8 million people have fled Ukraine towards western Europe. Ecocide, in the form of attacks on dams and other installations, the mining of huge tracts of land, the hostage-taking of Ukrainian nuclear power staff and a world food crisis are other physical and political manifestations of the invasion being felt around the globe. It has been Ukraine’s resistance and response which leads us to now call this conflict the Russo-Ukrainian War.
On the 6th of September 2023, while war continues to rage in Ukraine, a group of people, equipped with tents and a marquee, pitched their equipment in front of the Soviet Army Monument in Sofia, capital of the EU state of Bulgaria:
We are here to resist, yet again, the brazen powerholders' attempts to demolish the Soviet Army Monument, to try to demolish any monument in Bulgaria symbolizing various periods in Bulgarian history,’ Georgi Svilenski MP of Bulgarian Socialist Party commented to journalists. ‘We are here to try to tell those people to read history, to realize what these monuments stand for and what they want to demolish because demolishing the Soviet Army Monument at this point is worse than being ignorant,’ he added.
So what does this monument stand for? In September 1946, when the local authority in Sofia adopted a decision on the erection of the monument, it argued that ‘by its fervent offensive’ the Red Army ‘created conditions for the liberation of the Bulgarian people from the German fascist yoke’. A government decision of October 1949 on the same subject referred to the Soviet Red Army as ‘Bulgaria's liberator from the fascist occupiers’. The statue was built in 1954 on the tenth anniversary of the Soviet ‘liberation' of the country. Communist Bulgaria’s manifestation of gratitude and loyalty to the USSR is a typical example of monumental art in the ‘classic’ Stalinist style. It was unveiled on September 8th, 1954 and marked the tenth anniversary of the Bulgarian ‘socialist revolution’.
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