With a crane, workers began on Tuesday to dismantle a 37-metre high Soviet Army monument in the Bulgarian capital Sofia after three decades of delay and debate.
“The monument is going to the past, where it belongs,” Ivaylo Mirchev, an MP of the co-ruling Democratic Bulgaria party, said on Tuesday.
Built in 1954 to commemorate the Soviet invasion of Bulgaria ten years earlier, Sofia’s local council voted for the monument’s removal in 1993 following the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe, but successive governments refrained from taking such a sensitive step.
Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine in February 2022 reignited debate over the Soviet legacy in Bulgaria and with it the fate of the monument, which has become the site of regular public art and protest actions.
Mirchev called the monument, which features a statue of a Red Army soldier holding a gun in the air and a group of charging Red Army soldiers, a “symbol of occupation” casting “a shadow not only on the capital but on our entire history”.
“We are not just deconstructing a monument, we are taking back the opportunity to understand history through our own prism, instead of through Russian propaganda,” he wrote on X, previously known as Twitter.
Today there is an increased police presence in the area as two opposing crowds – one in favor of the dismantling and another against it, carrying several Russian flags – are currently gathered near the site. The dismantling is expected to take a month.
Protest point
The monument, which stands in Sofia’s Knyzhevska garden and is a popular meeting point for young people, commemorates Soviet troops entering Bulgaria in September 1944, an event that marked the beginning of 45 years of hardline Communist rule.
After the collapse of Communism in Bulgaria in late 1989, local councillors in Sofia voted in 1993 to remove the monument, but the process became bogged down in red tape and politicking.
Elected last month with the backing of Bulgaria’s main pro-European parties, Sofia mayor Vassil Terziev, a 45-year-old tech entrepreneur, had called for the removal to go ahead just as debate raged over his family’s connections to Communist party structures.
On December 7, the Sofia regional administration said the monument should be dismantled for safety reasons and that the sculptures required restoration.
In recent history, the monument and surrounding park have been associated with the local skate and punk culture, while the annual Sofia Pride event has used it as a gathering spot since 2012.
In 2011, the art collective Destructive Creative graffiti painted the Red Army figures in the colours of fictional American pop culture icons including Superman, Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald, in a reference to Bulgaria’s changing course.
Then in 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, part of the monument was painted blood red and the plaque was vandalised.
The Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia has said it does not have capacity to preserve the monument and it remains unclear what exactly will happen with it.
Source : Balkan Insight