The year of the 75th anniversary of the Victory in WWII was accompanied by unprecedented discussions and even scandals over the creation and dismantling of military monuments dedicated to the heroes and victims of the war. The quarantine caused by the COVID-2019 pandemic made bizarre adjustments to this process, both in cases where new monuments should have been opened and old ones dismantled.
The problem of the demolition and preservation of military monuments has become especially acute, as is the general problem of military monuments in the world. It is therefore important to identify individual cases, trends, causes of this phenomenon, its historical preconditions, because the war against monuments and their desecration have taken an avalanche form and have already reached such previously untouchable figures in the West as Churchill, de Gaulle, the founding fathers of the United States, some American presidents. Historians and political scientists have introduced a new term "depedestalization".
In Russia, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Victory, a great deal of work was carried out to perpetuate the memory of the War, associated with monumental sculpture and its objects. The largest of them was the memorial to the Soviet soldier in Rzhev by Andrey Korobtsov.
In recent years, a number of new monuments to wartime figures have appeared, which were not in the foreground at the time. The most famous monument, unveiled in 2018, was the giant figure of the machine gun designer Mikhail Kalashnikov in Moscow by Salavat Sherbakov.
In October 2017, a monument to the head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service during the WWII, Pavel Fitin, was unveiled in front of the press office of the Foreign Intelligence Service in Moscow. Outside of the glorification of Fitin's personality was the fact that he was involved in organizing the murder of Leon Trotsky and other Stalinist crimes. The author of the monument, Andrei Kovalchuk, has recently made a whole gallery of statues of historical figures of Russia.
In Poland new monuments are being erected to the heroes of World War II, first of all, to the participants of the anti-Soviet underground who fought both against the Germans and against the Red Army. Among the military monuments created in Poland in the early 2000s, it should be noted a major work of the outstanding sculptor Gustav Zemla - a monument to the Heroes of Monte Cassino.
In the center of Miskolc, the capital of the region of northern Hungary, a memorial to the fallen heroes of the city was erected. According to the author's intention, the monument embodies the suffering of the Hungarian people in the XXth century.
In this presentation I will compare how different narratives and views over the events, heroes and battles of World War II as well as memory policy are reflected in monumental art in Russia and Central Europe and what kind of historical artistic values are dominating in both parts of the considered regions.
