On 7 April this year , a group of unknown vandals entered the Soviet War Memorial at Treptower Park in East Berlin , and began spraying graffiti on the statues and memorial stones . Their protest was deliberately provocative . The park is not only the site of several large monuments , it also serves as a cemetery for 7,000 Soviet soldiers who died in 1945 during the battle for Berlin . The graffiti consisted of red paint reminiscent of blood , and slogans that ranged from “ Putin = Stalin ” and “ Death to all Russians ”, to more direct references to the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine .
It would be easy to dismiss this as a one-off attack on Russian culture sparked by current events , but actually it demonstrates a series of shifts in popular memory that have taken place over the last 20 or 30 years .
In the first place it shows a conflation between Soviet and Russian history in the popular imagination . Treptower Park was built to commemorate a Soviet victory in 1945 , in which Ukrainians and Russians fought side by side as part of the same army ; and Stalin , their wartime leader , was not Russian but Georgian . Such subtleties have been lost today : the Red Army is now often remembered exclusively as a Russian army .
1 . Panorama of the Soviet War Memorial at Treptow ( Treptower Park ). ( Wikimedia Commons ) overview
57