New Statues in Russia

From David Johnson's excellent Russian news summary letter.

http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson

Mosnews.com
October 22, 2004
Eccentric Monuments Replace Overturned Lenin Busts
Polina Moroz

In Moscow, a sculpture of a pickle will commemorate one of Russia’s beloved
snacks. 38 designs were judged by Muscovites in a popular vote for the most
original concept. Ten finalists were selected for the second round, after
which the winner will be cast in bronze. The contest is organized by the
Knyazev production center which wants to unveil the statue as “a monument
to a truly Russian snack”.

Constructing random monuments is all the rage in Russia. After decades of
the obligatory statues of Lenin and Stalin on every town’s main square,
people are acquiring a taste for sculptures that honor everyday things or
overlooked characters from Russian culture.

Famous poet Alexander Pushkin is an ever popular monument item, and a
cultural figure that is a constant source of folklore. However, a new
sculpture in Pskov region depicts not the poet, but a hare that supposedly
ran across Pushkin’s path in 1825, when Pushkin was fleeing exile to St.
Petersburg. Being the superstitious Russian that he was, Pushkin changed
plans considering the hare a bad omen. Good for him, since it saved him
from participating in the Decembrist uprising against the regime that led
many of his friends to the scaffold. 175 years later Russians honor the
hare for stopping Pushkin and giving him 13 more years of productive
writing. Despite the hare’s efforts, Pushkin didn’t live to see 40: he was
killed in a duel in 1837.

One new statue in the Moscow metro commemorates the misery of all homeless
dogs. Entitled “Empathy”, the dog sculpture is situated in a metro passage
where two years ago a stray dog was viciously butchered by 22-year-old
model Juliana Romanova. Romanova reportedly set her Staffordshire terrier
on the dog, and then stabbed it six times with a kitchen knife. She was
later declared insane and locked up in a mental hospital. The statue is in
memory of all mistreated canines and depicts a dog sitting on a granite
pedestal and scratching out fleas.

Other new projects feature products that are symbolic for a particular
city, or beloved Russian foods. One such sculpture will be a tribute to the
processed cheese “Druzhba” (friendship). This year the cheese turns 40
years old, and many consider it a true symbol of the Soviet era.

In Minusinsk, Krasnoyarsk Region, the mayor announced a contest for the
best design of a tomato sculpture, to be set up on the central square. In
Novgorod, pensioner Nikolai Zaryadov has constructed a makeshift potato
monument in his home village: a two meter pipe with a large rock,
presumably a potato, on top. At the foot of this potato shrine is the
inscription “Thank you Columbus, thank you Peter the Great, for our beloved
vegetable!” Zaryadov says he constructed the sculpture so that the current
generation of Russians can remember that the vegetable saved millions of
people from starvation.

Why the sudden urge to put up quirky statues? The city hall of Angarsk
(north-east Russia), which plans to construct a sculpture of a marmot,
wants to “attract tourists and to put people in a good mood”, but there are
also historical and cultural causes.

In an interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the assistant director of the
Tretyakov gallery, Alexander Morozov, commented on this new trend for
monument construction: “We have an urge to fill our daily lives with signs
and symbols that bring back memories. I think this initiative comes from
the people themselves. We never had any pop art when it was popular in the
U.S.” Indeed, monuments in Russia were traditionally meaningful and
demanded reverence, since the subject matter was always serious: first, war
memorials, then statues of communist leaders and famous writers.

Monuments always have a symbolic power over public space, and their history
has social, not just artistic, significance. In the Moscow suburb where I
grew up there was always a statue of Lenin next to the local “House of
Culture”. First he lost his hand, then his head. Then overnight Lenin
disappeared. The empty pedestal was too shocking for the local communists,
and they addressed the local city government for some kind of replacement.
The local city government came up with the brilliant idea of crowning two
old pipes with a small white Lenin head. This hideous construction was
toppled in a matter of weeks and the whole monument replaced with a
flowerbed. Goodness knows what will appear next; a turnip? We wait in fear.