Summer of Memories # 2: Poland - parallel battles

The ongoing fight over whether to remove or keep the makeshift cross, erected outside Poland’s Presidential Palace in Warsaw to commemorate Lech Kaczynski, has been documented elsewhere in this blog (below). Its role in crystallizing discussions about contemporary Polish identity and, broadly defined, the politics of memory, are further highlighted by a comment piece in Gazeta Wyborcza, worth presenting here: ‘Battle of the Cross’ (‘Bitwę pod krzyzem’).

Memory of August 1991 Coup in Russian Politics

Commemorating the anniversary of the August 1991 failed hardliner coup was a key focus of an opposition demonstration in Moscow on 22 August. The rally was held at the site of the deaths of the White House defenders killed during the August days.

10th International Katyń Motorcycle Marathon to begin this weekend

Bikers are gathering in anticipation of the start of the 10th International Katyń Motorcycle Marathon in Warsaw this Saturday.

Post-Smolensk Crash Tensions in Poland

Tensions surrounding the aftermath of the Smolensk plane crash hit a peak today in Poland as crowds gathered to prevent the government from relocating a crucifix erected outside the Presidential Palace in Warsaw to commemorate the crash victims.

Stalin Monument Unveiled in Zaporizhzhia

Well, they succeeded. Today the Communist Party of Ukraine unveiled a three-metre monument to a uniformed and decorated Iosif Stalin in Zaporizhzhia, the first erected since Ukraine's independence. Video of the ceremony -- and the attendant protest -- follows below.



The weather was unusually hot in Zaporizhzhia today, and UNIAN is reporting that an elderly woman died during the unveiling ceremony. Three veterans of World War II were also hospitalized.

Putin in Katyn

7 April 2010 marked a premiere – on the invitation of the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the Prime Ministers of Russia and Poland met in the Katyn forest to commemorate the more than 20,000 Polish officers shot there by Soviet forces in 1940. In his address, Putin stated “этим преступлениям не может быть никаких оправданий”. Putin’s words could be a milestone on the path towards a reappraisal of the massacre in Russia. To the present day those shot here are not officially recognised as victims of Stalin’s terror, and many Russians continue to believe in the Soviet propaganda version, according to which the Katyn massacre was committed by German occupation forces and not the NKVD.


See Putin's speech here

For a comment by Arsenii Roginsky, chairman of "Memorial" see here

Tragically, the Polish President and a number of government officials were killed this morning in a plane crash on their way to an official ceremony in Katyn.

Remembering Gogol' / Hohol'

"Знаю, что мое имя после меня будет счастливее меня, и потомки тех же земляков моих, может быть, с глазами влажными от слез, произнесут примирение моей тени."  

"I know that after I'm gone my name will be happier than me and that the descendants of my countrymen, perhaps with teary eyes, will make peace with my shadow."

-- Gogol' to Zhukovskii, 12 November 1836 

Are today's descendants of the countrymen of Mykola Hohol' / Nikolai Gogol' making peace with his shadow?  The recent furor over Vladimir Bortko's new film adaptation of Taras Bul'ba, which the New York Times rather oddly called "a salvo in a culture war between Russia and Ukraine's Western-leaning leadership," seems to suggest otherwise.   

Films come and go, but the incorporated practices of ritual commemoration are forever -- or at least they aspire to be.  So how did Ukrainian and Russian political figures mark the 200th anniversary of Mykola Hohol' / Nikolai Gogol's birthday on 1 April?  Below, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko lays a wreath before Hohol''s statue in Kyiv, and Russian Minister of Culture Aleksandr Avdeev pays tribute before Gogol''s grave in Moscow.

The photos offer us two different Gogols. In the first photo, the appearance of Tymoshenko (wearing her trademark zachiska) and those that flank her (wearing colourful Cossack sharovary and other forms of national dress) suggests Mykola Hohol' the Ukrainian auto-ethnographer, the playful author of the early Dikanka stories (1831-32). Bright, bountiful flowers celebrate him. In the second, Aleev and the Orthodox clergy suggest Nikolai Gogol' the Russian sermonizer, the defender of Christian morals of the later Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). Modest candles mourn him.

There are many Gogols indeed. As to the question of whether he is 'Russian' or 'Ukrainian' -- a question given new life with Bortko's Bul'ba -- it's high time we moved away from reductive 'either-or' identitarian vocabulary.  Lest we forget:

«Сам не знаю, какая у меня душа, хохлацкая [украинская] или русская. Знаю только то, что никак бы не дал преимущества ни малороссиянину перед русским, ни русскому перед малороссиянином. Обе природы слишком щедро одарены Богом, и, как нарочно, каждая из них порознь заключает в себе то, чего нет в другой, – явный знак, что они должны пополнить одна другую. Для этого самые истории их прошедшего быта даны им непохожие одна на другую, дабы порознь воспитывались различные силы их характера, чтобы потом, слившись воедино, составить собою нечто совершеннейшее в человечестве».  Gogol' to Smirnova, December 1844