Former outposts of the Soviet Union are dismantling memorials to the bygone power in protest over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, except for a notable exception: Berlin.
The capital of Germany boasts a dozen Soviet monuments, including an imposing shrine to fallen soldiers in Treptower Park near the Spree river. While most are in the former communist East, some are also in sectors that were under US and British control after World War II, including a memorial incorporating Soviet tanks a short walk from Brandenburg Gate.
Despite Germany’s opposition to the war in Ukraine and widespread public support for sanctions against Moscow, the country’s more than 1,000 Soviet monuments are mostly on solid ground. That’s a stark contrast to movements to tear down memorials in former Soviet republics in the Baltics and ex-Warsaw Pact allies such as Poland.
The difference stems from the Red Army’s role in defeating the Nazis — commemorated by the numerous memorials as well as the scribblings of Russian soldiers on the walls of the Reichstag parliament building.
Still, the current tension with Moscow has left its mark in Berlin. A museum where the Nazi regime capitulated changed its name from the German-Russian Museum to simply Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, after the district where it’s located.
Housed in the Soviet Union’s former World War II headquarters, it’s co-sponsored by Russia and its ally Belarus as well as Germany and Ukraine — whose flag waves in front of the building. That has director Jörg Morré searching for a way forward.
“We currently have a problem in reconciling the cultures of remembrance in our partner countries,” said Morré. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is becoming “less and less possible” to jointly represent perspectives on World War II from central and eastern Europe.
For Baltic countries — home to some of the most vocal opposition to Russia’s invasion — the relationship is much clearer. They were occupied by the Soviets in 1940 as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and later annexed, a move accompanied by brutal deportations.
In late August, Latvian authorities toppled an 80-meter (262-foot) obelisk commemorating the Soviet victory over Nazism in a park in Riga, with crowds watching the structure crash into a reflecting pool. That came a week after Estonia removed a T-34 Soviet tank in the city of Narva on the border with Russia, which also memorialized the wartime victory.
“That shock is still in the limbs of these countries today,” Morré said. After the Red Army defeated the Nazis, “the oppressors of 1940 simply returned,” he said, adding that it’s a “huge historical difference with Germany.”
Memorials elsewhere have become a touchstone as history gets reevaluated. In the US, statues of Confederate generals have been torn down, while in Europe, monuments to architects of colonialism are under attack.
“Monuments shape public discourse,” said Patryk Szostak, spokesman of the Polish-funded Pilecki Institute in Berlin, which promotes research on Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes.
To support efforts to prod Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government into sending heavy weapons to Ukraine, the group helped create a video in which Soviet tanks flanking the monument near Brandenburg Gate were dragged off their pedestals and towed to Kyiv by Ukrainian tractors. It was one of the few public efforts that took issue with Germany’s monuments.
“We would be in favor of cultivating a conscious, critical and historically versed approach” to the Soviet past, Szostak said, adding that info boards to put memorials into context could be an option to dismantling them.
Regardless of any public upswell against Russia, Germany’s Soviet memorials are protected. Before the country was reunified in 1990, both parts of Germany signed a treaty with the four allied powers including the Soviet Union and agreed to retain and care for the monuments.
“We should clearly show that we respect treaties in freedom and democracy — even with the Russian Federation,” said Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian who grew up in East Germany. “That is also our strength, to endure that.”
Another hurdle to tearing down Berlin’s monuments is that many are cemeteries. Some 80,000 Red Army soldiers died capturing Berlin, and about 13,000 of those are buried at a sprawling facility in the Schönholzer Heide park in northern Berlin. The monument to the “Great Patriotic War” — as the Soviet Union called World War II — includes a statue of a mother mourning her fallen son.
The inscription on the pedestal reads: “Not in vain was the death and blood of the Soviet soldiers. Not in vain the grief and tears of mourning mothers, widows and orphans. They call for the struggle for lasting peace among peoples.”
The message carries resonance in Germany, especially since West German President Richard von Weizsäcker declared in a landmark 1985 speech that the nation’s defeat was a “liberation” — a firm break from any lingering ambiguity in the decades after the war ended.
The recent death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, shows how the memory of the fall of communism is still “deeply divided” in eastern and western Europe.
“So divided that it practically hardly comes together,” said Kowalczuk, adding that Gorbachev was seen as a hero by the West, but his legacy is stained by blood in the former Soviet sphere.
Similar conflicts are evident within modern Germany. The former communist east is less antagonistic toward Russia because of historic ties. Many East Germans suffered social and economic hardship from reunification, giving rise to so-called Ostalgie — a German portmanteau combining the words for “east” and “nostalgia” and signifying sympathy for aspects of the Soviet system.
In Karlshorst, museum director Morré is considering inviting Baltic countries to share their perspectives on World War II, but doesn’t see closing the museum or tearing down monuments as an answer to the current tensions with Russia.
“In the end, you just have to say whether someone likes it or not, the Soviet Union liberated Germany from Nazism,” Kowalczuk said. “These things are a reminder of that.”