Authors

Discussion

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century was marked by the inversion of symbols. The removal of the monuments dedicated to Vladimir I. Lenin after the August Putsch became the most emblematic part of this process, especially across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. By looking beyond the moment of removal of one such monument – the Lenin monument in Riga, Latvia – my paper will look at the preceding processes of de-heritagisation that unfolded over the last two years of the Soviet Union. I will highlight the intersections between the earlier processes of de-commemoration that began under the auspices of glasnost in the late-1980s and the subsequent processes of reassessment of Lenin monuments (symbolic de-heritagisation). As I will unpack, this eventually led to legal de-heritagisation - removal of the legal protection granted by the Soviet heritage lists – that paved the way to the removal of the Lenin monument in Riga in the wake of the August Putsch and the proclamation of de facto independence of the Republic of Latvia.