Silent Sentinels at Center of Lithuanian Debate on Bygone Era [Commie statues]

NYT ^ | November 11, 2013 | James Kanter

[1rudeboy]

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Watching over one of this city’s busiest thoroughfares are the sentinels of a loathed regime.

The statues of Red Army soldiers, workers, farmers and young scientists on Green Bridge, spanning the Neris River in the center of the city, are the last major monuments on public display here that still trumpet Communism, an ideology rejected by Lithuania more than two decades ago when it became the first part of the Soviet Union to declare independence.

With their shirts pushed against their broad torsos, and coats and skirts billowing around muscular legs, the statues in the mode of Socialist Realism have stood firm against the political storms that have plagued the nation’s capital. They have been less successful resisting the ravages of time. After more than six decades in the open, the iron is pockmarked and rusted. One soldier is held together by bolts and braces. A young scientist’s back is marred by a large fissure.

The decay of the statues has posed difficult questions for this still emerging country, both practical and philosophical. Should public money be spent to restore the works or should they be removed? Is it better to preserve the symbols of an ugly and unwanted past, or to try to forget?

“It would be no loss if they were demolished altogether,” said Kestutis Masiulis, a member of Parliament and a former deputy mayor of Vilnius. He said the statues insulted Lithuanians who suffered under a government that expropriated farms, quashed professional and academic freedoms and subjected more than 300,000 people to arrest, imprisonment and exile to Russian prison camps. “I sometimes feel that negative experience should somehow be erased,” he said.

Others, like Lolita Jablonskiene, the chief curator of the country’s National Gallery of Art, argue for a more “complicated attitude.”

[campaignPete R-CT]

maybe the U.S. could buy the statues and place them on the Washington Mall ...

[SunkenCiv]

Like the “Dome of the Rock”, these are just symbols of conquest erected by a bloody conqueror.

Thanks 1rudeboy.

Speech delivered by Joseph V Stalin, February 9th, 1946
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3092082/posts

[Berosus]

Sell them to some blue state liberals. Didn’t a city in Washington State buy a statue of Lenin a few years back?

[SunkenCiv]

There’s some idiotic college that has a vintage statue of Lenin in its quad. Seems like it wouldn’t be that hard a job to take that out of there in the middle of the night, or better yet, cut off the head and replace it with Reagan’s.