Authors

Deniss Hanovs¹;  ¹ Art Academy of Latvia, Latvia

Discussion

The paper reflects upon the political discourse on demolition of the so-called “Victory monument” on August 25, 2022 in Riga, Latvia. The monument was the intergenerational site of memory for Russophone community to commemorate WWII victims  on May 9. The decision to demolish the monument, accelerated by Putin's war against Ukraine, produced new forms of  memory politics by ethnic majority. Movement for Liberation from the Soviet Past organised a march against the Soviet heritage in Riga and suggested to demolish all monuments commemorating Soviet version of the 20th century history. In public opinion polls ethnic minorities were mostly against the demolition of Soviet monuments (SKDS, spring 2023). Ideas and images of a sacred, victim-monument started to develop in digital communities of minorities. The monument was not reloaded and did not become a site to remember totalitarianism and its ambiguous memories.    
    The analysis attempts to make Baltic post-colonial studies more diverse and inclusive by asking critical questions concerning possibility of establishing and practicing of discoursive and performative patterns of post-Soviet coloniality which I define as cultural activities which may lead to discoursive hierarchies in a post-colonial society, also in terms of memory politics, using patterns of creating subaltern communities inherited from Soviet matrix of coloniality and not critically deconstructed during fragmented decolonisation.  As Soviet coloniality is an ideological matrix tangible in diverse cultural practices (Annus 2019, 7) the case study proposes a critical look at semiotic dimension of production of post-colonial condition of Russian speakers. Does Latvian memory politics towards Russian speakers’ memory content, include spatial and performative tools which would suggest that there are risks for a post-colonial society to revitalise and translate colonial patterns of the Soviet past into a form of hierarchical decolonisation? Can minority past develop into a subaltern past, which is not “good” as it would not support “social justice and representative democracy” (Chakrabarty 2000,107) in Latvia?
     As colonial discourses create wide range of myths and story-telling (Mbembe 2021, 90) I will analyse certain examples of mnemonic tension articulated in metaphoric constructions of the monument on “both sides” of memory space.    
    Radicalisation of memory actors prevents Latvian society from moving towards multidirectional memory politics (Rothberg 2021, 29), which could lead Latvian society towards new civil solidarities and justice. The analysis of the case study will be framed by conceptual input on post-colonial politics in the Baltics by Annus and Dzenovska and global perspectives on memory discourses and de-colonisation politics in memory studies by Mbembe, Rothberg and Assmann.