The former Yugoslavia is filled with unique monuments to World War II called Spomeniks that have evolved in their meaning and underlying ideology depending on the political and social climate at the time.

The Allied victory at the end of World War II legitimized the newly formed Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and the ruling Communist Party, led by Josip Tito. The Spomeniks (monuments) that were created during the Tito years were symbolic, abstract representations of fallen heroes and victims of fascism as described by Senadin Musabegovi, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sarajevo, and Bojana Pejic, art historian. Following Tito's death in 1980, new nationalisms resulted in altering the interpretation of many of the Spomeniks in accordance with local nationalist sentiments.

The Spomeniks of the former Yugoslavia were created out of a need to remember lives lost and the struggle for victory over the fascist occupiers. Older monuments created by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia were deemed unnecessary and were destroyed out of a need to forget the former rulers while creating a new multi-national state that was unified under one Yugoslav banner. For Tito, this was essential so that the underlying national tensions could be pacified under his “Brotherhood and Unity” ideology. This unification was important because his vision depended on the myth of a single national liberation victory for all of Yugoslavia, not any single ethnicity, according to Veljko Radulovic, an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Montenegro.

The Yugoslav Communist Party celebrated the underlying myths of uprising and revolution. The National Liberation War was the uprising and seen as the victory over the invading fascists, while the revolution was the state being forged through the “brotherhood and unity” of the many ethnicities coming together to accomplish the victory as noted by Musabegovic and Pejic. With the creation of these new monuments arose a new collective Yugoslav memory and a new artform known as “socialist modernism”. During this time, Yugoslavia was unique in that it did not constrain its artists to state-mandated realist projects that emphasized a human figure, like the Soviet Union or other communist countries. Yugoslav artists began to interpret ideas and concepts in a more abstract form resulting in various art projects including the Spomeniks.

Two examples of Spomeniks that were created in the socialist modernist style are The Battle of Sutjeska Memorial Monument Complex at Tjentiste and the Monument to the Revolution in Kozara National Park. The Sutjeska Memorial was originally conceived in 1958. At the time it was simply a crypt for 3000 soldiers who fell during the 1943 Battle of Sutjeska which demonstrated that Tito’s partisans could withstand the German onslaught, resulting in the Allies beginning to directly support Tito. In 1971, the monument was completed by architect Miodrag Zivkovic and is one of the most important World War II monuments in Yugoslavia. It is often compared to the Greek “Winged Hero of Samothrace” due to of the shapes of the wings as well as Greece and Bosnia being seen by some as crossroads of ideas, politics, and religion according to the Spomenik Database. Unfortunately, during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, there was an attempt to blow up the monument. Today, the monument enjoys a resurgent popularity not because of its former ideological presence, but because of its artistic form. It is used as a venue for music festivals and art shows. It has even inspired other artworks such as the Ninth Fort WWII monument in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Kozara National Park, near Prijedor, Bosnia, was originally created in 1958 as it was deemed by Tito to be of “historical significance” owing to the 1942 Battle of Kozara as noted on the park's website. According to the local Prijedor Danas newspaper, a Monument to the Revolution construction committee was formed in 1962 with 49 applicants submitting design ideas with the one from Dusan Dzamonja being selected. The memorial was completed in 1972, with an adjacent museum, also designed by Dzamonja, built one year later to house battle relics and artifacts. In a 2007 interview documented in the Spomenki Database, Dzamonja would say that “it was a common saying in Yugoslavia those who were going to Rome, those who were going to Mecca, and those going to Kozara (…) It is a very isolated place, you have to want it.”

The Monument to the Revolution at Kozara rises 33 m to its peak. It is rather difficult to get inside the monument, as Dzamonja wanted it to feel claustrophobic so that a visitor feels like the partisans who were surrounded by the Axis armies. He wanted people to feel that although there was little room for escape, there is always light which triumphs over the darkness. When one looks up, light shines in through a uniquely shaped circle. For locals, this symbolizes two ideas according to Gal Kirn, Faculty of Arts (Sociology of Culture) at the University of Ljubljana. The shape of the circle represents a Kolo dance, a local folk dance, which signifies solidarity and cohesiveness within living in a multinational community. The other is the suffocating feeling of the fascist armies closing in on the light.

The Kozara monument was largely spared during the Yugoslav wars due to its remote location. However, this did not keep the monument from becoming a piece of nationalist propaganda. The area was occupied by Serbian nationalists which resulted in a pro-victimized Serbian context to the museum displays with many other groups left out as their inclusion wouldn't fit the desired narrative as noted by Manuela Brenner, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Regensburg. This allowed the meaning of the monument to be deconstructed and then reconstructed to fit the needs of the occupiers, who pushed Serbian ethnicity rather than overall loss of life. After the war, the narrative was changed to not solely emphasize Serb losses. However, because Kozara and the city of Prijedor are in the Republika Srpska, an area dominated by Bosnian Serbs, some nationalist rhetoric remains according to Brenner. Like the monument at Sutjeska, Kozara enjoyed a rebirth of memory in the 2000’s as it has become home to commemorative ceremonies in remembrance to the battles fought here in the second World War.

Gal Kirn, Faculty of Arts (Sociology of Culture) at the University of Ljubljana, has stated that the post-WWII Yugoslavia monuments were the memorialization of a resistance movement based on a transnational ideal amongst the varying ethnicities that had been united under Tito’s banner. By bringing the ethnicities together, it attempted to omit the varying degrees of tension and hostility that each group might have against one another. The feeling of monuments amongst those same ethnicities today is a representation of the failure of a nation to eliminate these underlying tensions and stay together. Kirn believes that the monuments represent the past, as well as the defeat of Yugoslavia, with their original meanings often misunderstood. It is interesting to note that interpretation of the monuments continues to change even if the artists themselves specifically highlighted what it was supposed to mean.

Understanding the overall dynamic of Yugoslav monuments depends on the social and political climate in which they are portrayed. During their construction they were billed as abstract representations of the state ideology of “Brotherhood and Unity.” They came to represent a present and a future multinational state that attempted to omit or silence the tense inter-ethnic conflicts of the individual regions. Brenner states that once Yugoslavia dissolved, the monuments that had served the socialist republic needed to be deconstructed and reimagined in a way that fit the narratives of each new state. This was especially so for the Monument to the Revolution where the monument was made to fit the Serb narrative by placing a cross nearby, directed against the Muslim population. It is anticipated that as long as these monuments stand, they will continue to have meanings that are interpreted in ways that fit the current social and political climate.

(Edited by Brad Poss)

For more (including 5 images), view the original article.

The Third Reich and the Soviet Union lost more troops in six months at Stalingrad than the United States did throughout the entire war. Unlike the United States, whose citizens were mainly safe behind the great walls of the Atlantic and Pacific fronts, the fighting was so fierce at Stalingrad that Soviet able-bodied citizens were required to fight. Although the battle resulted in a near-disastrous defeat for the Soviet Union, they pushed back the fierce German advance, marking a critical turning point in World War II. To honor the heroes of Stalingrad, the Soviet Union built what stands as the tallest statue in Europe and the tallest statue of a woman in the world, The Motherland Calls.

As World War II ended, constructing a monument to the war dead of Stalingrad was not at the top of Josef Stalin's mind. In fact, for someone who was, for better or worse, the center of an extensive personality cult, very little was built to memorialize his greatest victory. Of course, statues of Lenin, Marx, and himself went up ceaselessly, but for the 20 million plus Soviets that died at the hands of the Nazis, there was shockingly little memorial. The proletariat needed to continue bringing the Soviets into the new era, and time and resources were far too limited to spend on building great monuments to the dead. Despite the enormity of the Battle of Stalingrad, it would take over 20 years after the conclusion of World War II for the Soviet Union to pay homage to the dead at Stalingrad. As noted by historian Lisa Kirschenbaum: "After 1947, when Victory Day became an ordinary work day, the state substantially curtailed the ritual spaces and times allotted for reflecting on both the heroes and the victims of the war. The cult of the war that emerged after Josef Stalin's death changed all this."

Upon Stalin's death on March 5th, 1953, memorials began to arise, some in honor, some in remembrance, but all in defiance of the now-deceased Soviet leader. Less than seven months after Stalin's death, plans for constructing a memorial cemetery and museum on the summit of Mamayev Kurgan to honor the heroes of Stalingrad began, resulting in the enormous statue, The Motherland Calls. Completed in 1967 and standing nearly 280 feet tall, it is a towering monument to the 1.2 million Soviet casualties. It remains the tallest statue in Europe and the tallest statue of a woman in the world.

Built as a propaganda piece, The Motherland Calls is part of the more prominent "Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad" complex. Mamayev Kurgan is not the site of a single monument but a complex of monuments to honor the Great Patriotic War. The project designer, Evgenii Viktorovich Vuchetich, was responsible for many post-World War II memorials in the Soviet sphere, including the Soviet Union's first major military memorial complex, a cemetery for the Red Army soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin. The project's construction was to last roughly four years at the estimated cost of 39.5 million rubles, or approximately 4.84 million U.S. dollars, in 2021. The project was not finished until 1967, at 68 million rubles, nearly twice the original estimate. The exact number of workers and man-hours spent on the project is unknown. Once completed, the entire complex covered 1.3 square miles, and the statue itself was impressive: Standing 287 feet tall (not including its base) and weighing 7900 tons, it is an architectural masterpiece.

The monument has suffered from structural issues since its construction—several renovations, including the replacement of its giant sword as well as efforts to improve its overall stability. The statue underwent significant renovations in 2017 at the cost of $35,000,000. One process was to resurface and weather-proof several surfaces to renovate the statue's appearance in time for the 75th Anniversary of the end of World War II. The monument serves as the centerpiece of a much larger memorial. There are nearly 35,000 Soviet war dead buried on the grounds of the statue and monument. One must walk through several other sections of the memorial to get to the base of the statue: The Ruined Walls Memorial, the Lake of Tears pool, the Hall of Military Glory (which, alongside the Kremlin, are the only places in Russia to host a permanent military guard of honor), and the square of grief, before reaching the base of the monument.

The meanings, themes, and propaganda behind The Motherland Calls are often as convoluted – if not even more so – than the story of its construction or the cost to repair and maintain the work. Vuchetich himself was a controversial figure. Part of the old orthodox guard of the Communist Party, he was often favored through patronage and contacts over artists who were often younger and more skilled than he. For a memorial supposed to represent the accurate idea of what it was to engage in proletarian sacrifice, its conception, construction, and reality are shrouded in nepotism, cronyism, and many of the same oligarchic issues plaguing Russia today. Were it not for the transparency of the Soviet Union that arose from both de-Stalinization and glasnost, these facts may have never come to light.

Despite any shortcomings of the lead designer, Vuchetich seemed determined to give the statue an international flavor. The piece is far unlike anything to come out of Soviet realism or out of the Brutalist periods that followed, unless, of course, one considers cold concrete to be more Brutalist than the copper that makes up the Statue of Liberty. Scott Palmer notes that:
"The resulting figure was clearly based on the "Nike of Samothrace" (220–219 B.C.), the world-famous statue of the Greek goddess of victory. When a few members of the artistic-expert committee suggested that the sculptor depict the Motherland in a costume more befitting her Russian national character, Vuchetich demurred. He claimed that doing so would detract from her monumentalism, dynamism, and expressiveness. Given that the Battle of Stalingrad "was an international event," dressing the figure in a national costume would be "inaccurate."

One of the issues in discussing the efforts and people that went into constructing The Motherland Calls and other Soviet monuments is the lack of primary source documents that survived the event. Aside from being in Russian and often inaccessible to the average non-Russian scholar, there is no way to know what was censored, destroyed, or purged by Stalin, the de-Stalinization process, or by later efforts from Russia as the Soviet successor state.

The monument's style calls for international unity yet hearkens its viewers to celebrate Russian nationalism. The sheer enormity of the monument and the myths surrounding the Great Patriotic War often overshadow the true horror and scope of what actually happened at Stalingrad. The monument towers over the landscape of the former Stalingrad – and over the material, social, and metaphysical context in which we understand the largest battle in human history.

(edited by Brad Poss and Laura Bailey)

For more (including 6 images), view the original article.