Authors

Discussion

What is to be done with monumental propaganda?

 This question rang through 1990s post-socialist spaces. In Moscow, monuments were contested, disavowed, coopted, or glorified: some were toppled and retired to sculpture park ‘graveyards’; others were enlisted by conceptualist artists and politicians as creative collaborators, transformed into history lessons and history teachers. (See Muzeon, est. August 1991 by Yeltsin, Komar and Melamid’s 1992 project Monumental Propaganda, or Osmalovsky’s 1993 action A Voyage to Brobdingnag Land).  

1990s policy towards monuments was uneven –some rested without plinths huddling with fellow damned and disfavoured comrades in the liminal space of the sculpture graveyard, others were recontextualised by artists and politicians, and others stood still, ignoble and ignored in their original site.

In 2023, the question ‘what is to be done with monumental propaganda?’ has renewed urgency. Since 2012 The Kremlin directed Russian Military Historical Society, has recast over 250 monuments as ideological foot soldiers for Putin’s new symbolic order making it very clear what’s best to remember, lest we forget. Concurrently a generation of younger artists are employing new techniques that directly and tacitly engage with the new monumentality that accompanied Putin’s second term. 

This paper asks how ritual around the disestablishment and reestablishment of monumental statues intersect with a wider body politic and historical traditions therein. It contrasts Kremlin-directed incursions into public space made by The Russian Military Historical Society 2012 – present, with strategies by artists who staged critical discourses that engaged with the birth and entropy of monuments, gesturing broadly to the generation(s) of artists emerging within ‘post-Soviet’ Moscow, and looking closely at Dimitri Venkov’s short film Krisis (2016), a dramatisation of a Facebook discussion surrounding Leninopadi, and Maria Shymchuk’s photographed action Erotic Vandalism (2016). 

 Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship of Moscow specialists, architectural historians, art critics, political commentators, and semioticians, this paper teases out deeply rooted dualisms, which the ‘zombie’ metaphor invokes, demonstrating that 'zombie monuments' reveal contemporary political imaginaries, and how artists engaged with these monuments uncover undercurrents within wider civil society, invisible to Western spectatorship.